Just how far can externalism go? In this exciting new book Ruth Millikan explores a radically externalist treatment of empirical concepts (Millikan 2000). For the last thirty years philosophy of mind’s ties to meaning internalism have been loosened. The theory of content has swung uncomfortably on its moorings in a fickle current, straining against opposing ties to mind and world. In this book ...

> context • The enactivist tradition, out of which neurophenomenology arose, rejects various internalisms – including the representationalist and information-processing metaphors – but remains wedded to one further internalism: the claim that the structure of perceptual experience is directly, constitutively linked only to internal, brain-based dynamics. > Problem • I aim to reject this interna...

This position paper has three parts. In the first part, a brief historical background and various modern formulations of the concept of emergence are presented. A number of problems associated with the concept are identified. One outstanding problem involves the incommensurability of secondary qualities (or phenomenal qualia) with materialist (externalist) ontologies. The intractability of this...

This paper develops and defends an internalist account of having authority for one’s claim. It begins with Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of thinking which locates the root notion of reasoning in a primitive language game of asking for and giving reasons. The idea is that the authority of a claim can be spelled out pragmatically in terms of the social practice of undertaking commitments an...

It has long been widely agreed that some concepts can be possessed only by those who have undergone a certain type of phenomenal experience. Orthodoxy among contemporary philosophers of mind has it that these phenomenal concepts provide the key to understanding many disputes between physicalists and their opponents, and in particular offer an explanation of Mary’s predicament in the situation e...

Much of the recent literature on reasons is focused on a common range of issues, concerning, for example, the relation between reasons and motivation, desires, and values, the issue of internalism versus externalism in the theory of reasons, or the objectivity or reasons. This paper is concerned with a different, and orthogonal, set of questions: What are reasons, and how do they support action...

I argue that the debate concerning nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or can be made in absence motivation (externalism), may founded on a faulty assumption: form distinct kind must have some shared, essential features regards to act. there is little reason suppose homogenous class this respect by considering an ordinary...

The purpose of this paper is to motivate and defend a recognizable version of N. L. Wilson’s “Principle of Charity.” Doing so will involve: (1) distinguishing it from the significantly different versions of the Principle familiar through the work of Quine and Davidson; (2) showing that it is compatible with, among other things, both semantic externalism and “simulation” accounts of interpretati...