Narrow Content and Representation, or Twin Earth Revisited

Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Matti Eklund
Keyword(s):  

This chapter explores the view—“presentationalism”—that normative sentences and propositions are mind-independently true, but what they represent is not normative. There are no normative properties or facts. This view, whatever in the end its fate, combines attractive features of realism and antirealism. The view is curiously absent from prominent accounts of the theoretical options. The possibility of a view like this problematizes important arguments in the literature, for example certain arguments for non-naturalism, and shows that one must be careful to distinguish between normative facts and normative truths. Toward the end of the chapter, I consider whether the Moral Twin Earth arguments present problems for the view.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

Narrow mental content, if there is such a thing, is content that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker. A central topic in the philosophy of mind since the mid-1970s has been whether there is a kind of mental content that is narrow in this sense. It is widely conceded, thanks to famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, that there is a kind of mental content that is not narrow. But it is often maintained that there is also a kind of mental content that is narrow, and that such content can play various key explanatory roles relating, inter alia, to epistemology and the explanation of action. This book argues that this is a forlorn hope. It carefully distinguishes a variety of conceptions of narrow content and a variety of explanatory roles that might be assigned to narrow content. It then argues that, once we pay sufficient attention to the details, there is no promising theory of narrow content in the offing.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

In Chapter 2 we argue that internalists are committed to a kind of relativism, and that theirs is a particularly radical form of relativism. Thought experiments involving certain symmetries across space and/or time play a starring role. If the kinds of symmetries featured in them are possible, we argue, the truth values of narrow content must be relative to some very unusual parameters.


Author(s):  
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri ◽  
John Hawthorne

The Introduction outlines the history of the narrow content debate. It introduces the famous thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, discusses why the debate only came to prominence in the 1970s, and outlines what is to come.


1990 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 425-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Williams ◽  
Keyword(s):  


Mind ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 128 (511) ◽  
pp. 976-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Sawyer
Keyword(s):  

2000 ◽  
pp. 285-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian P. McLaughlin ◽  
Michael Tye
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-52
Author(s):  
Billy Dunaway

Moral Twin Earth thought experiments appear to show that practical language is highly stable, and that many possible users of practical language are capable of having genuine disagreements with each other. This chapter clarifies a tempting generalization of this idea, which is that the members of every pair of possible users of moral language are capable of having a genuine disagreement. This is the Universal Disagreement thesis. It then shows how this thesis can be adapted to a contextualist semantics for ‘ought’ and other practical terms. It concludes by arguing that, for the realist, the central explanatory target is a claim about the stability of practical language.


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