Boghossian’s Inference Argument against Content Externalism Reversed

What is it about?

Several incompatibilist arguments attempt to show that content externalism is inconsistent with self-knowledge of our thoughts. The ultimate goal of most of these arguments is to discredit externalism, since they claim that the theses regarding self-knowledge must be upheld. My position in relation to this debate is a compatibilist one. I believe that content externalism is fundamentally correct, and I include in this classification both linguistic externalism —according to which the meaning of (at least) some expressions depends on external factors that are not accessible to the subject via introspection— and intentional externalism —which proposes an analogous thesis with regard to mental states. However, I also believe that we have a certain type of privileged access to our thoughts, and thus some thesis regarding self-knowledge of content is equally true. From my point of view, for each incompatibilist argument an appropriate compatibilist reply can be found (and many such replies have already been found). In this paper I concentrate on one such argument. It was presented by Boghossian and it is related to our inferential rationality (to use his term). The main conclusion of Boghossian’s reasoning is that externalism is inconsistent with the fact that we know a priori whether an argument is logically valid or not (Boghossian refers to this supposed fact as the a priority of our logical abilities). This argument has also been replied to, from a range of positions. My main objective here is not to present a new externalist reply to that argument; rather, I aim to demonstrate that the problematic scenario described by Boghossian also constitutes a problem for internalist theories. Thus, the central thesis that I defend here is that the problematic situation that Boghossian describes represents an important challenge for any theory of content, not just for externalism. Furthermore, I will defend a stronger secondary thesis. This is that when we examine the different possible responses that externalism and internalism can deploy, it turns out that, to the extent that the problem bears on the externalism/internalism debate, it is the externalist side that comes out on top. I hope to show that the repertoire of solutions that the externalists can call on is more promising than the set of solutions that the internalists can invoke. I will also tentatively suggest a hypothesis that could explain this stronger thesis: the debate favours externalism because the example analysed by Boghossian involves the use of a singular term, and with respect to singular terms, our externalist intuitions (as highlighted by Putnam and Burge in their thought experiments about Twin Earths) are even stronger than they are with respect to natural kind terms (which are usually invoked to illustrate the discussion).

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