On The Compatibility Of Self-Knowledge And Content Externalism

Traditionally speaking, self-knowledge plays a special role in epistemology. It is regarded as another way of knowing about things in the external world. The main difference is that we acquire self-knowledge by introspection, namely,"looking inward", instead of "looking outward." No matter how external environment changes, we could still see some objects in the mind by introspection. Those objects are deter-mined by some internal factors called "intensions" in traditional semantics. However, Kripke-Putnam’s semantic externalism shows that mental content is affected by exter-nal environment. Following this line, McKinsey questions traditional theory of self-knowledge. He thinks that the content of thoughts and perceptions is determined by external factors. We cannot know a priori of what we are thinking or perceiving merely by introspection.Contemporary philosophers have two choices to solve the conflict between self-knowledge and content externalism. One is incompatiblism, which claims that one of the two theories-self-knowledge or content externalism is wrong. But it does not work. The other is compatiblism, which aims to make these two theories compatible by further analysis or theoretic construction. Nevertheless, if we mix up intensional semantic and Kripke-Putnam’s semantic externalism directly, it would lead to the theory of "narrow content". This kind of theory deems representations as content, therefore confuses vehicles to the content they carry, which is unacceptable. We need a new theory of content externalism which could guarantee that the content is deter-mined externally and also we can know the object of thoughts and perceptions. The Twin Earth thought experiment tells us that we can be wrong about of what we are thinking or perceiving. To surmount this trouble, we should choose the Millikanian theory which admits that representations and content are fallible.Chapter2introduces the theory of representation and misrepresentation which Millikan called "biosemantics." By studying both natural and intentional signs, we know that representations are the signs which have proper functions. Proper functions are selected because they successfully benefit the survival and proliferation of organisms in the history. The factors which determine proper functions are historical rather than eternal. As a result, the explanations and conditions of successful perfor-mance of proper functions should be normative. This in term explains why misrepre-sentations could be produced. On the other hand, the study of proper functions shows that the content of representations is not determined by producers whose job is making representations. Rather, it is determined by consumers, i.e., the users of repre-sentations with which the producers have been designed to cooperate. The reason is that it is the consumers who make representations perform their proper functions. Traditional theories usually take descriptive representations to be the most important, thereby focus on the producers. Purely descriptive representations are, however, just a result of specifying of functions. The primitive representations are pushmi-pullyu ones, which are descriptive and directive at the same time. The content of pushmi-pullyu representations is determined by its survival value.What representations represent are complete world affairs. We cannot know about the objects of thoughts or perceptions just by it. We still need some kind of abilities to identify the content in order to know the objects of representations. In Chapter3, Millikan’s theory of unicepts is introduced to solve this problem. Unicepts are non-shared abilities of reidentifying objects. They make us capable of tracking substances or properties. By the act of reidentifying, we could know of what we are thinking or perceiving. Since unicepts are abilities, it is obvious that self-knowledge is a kind of knowing how rather than knowing that. It is about knowing how to re-identify something when we are "looking outward." Furthermore, most abilities come in degrees. Also, we could not always succeed in using this ability in any random circumstance. The moral is that self-knowledge is fallible. This version of fallible self-knowledge is immune from all kinds of misrepresentations and misidentifications caused by external factors.