Broad properties of beliefs

Yli-Vakkuri (2018) argues that content externalism can be established without thought experiments, as the deductive consequence of a pair of uncontroversial principles about beliefs, contents and truth. I argue that the most dialectically plausible motivation for the first principle, that truth is a broad property or beliefs, undermines the second principle, that the truth-value of a belief goes hand-in-hand with that of its content, and that other motivations are likely to depend on externalist thought experiments the argument was meant to avoid. As it stands, the argument for externalism therefore fails.

Content externalism and the subject’s point of view

In relation to perception-based demonstrative thoughts, I argue that, their intentions notwithstanding, Fregean and non-Fregean anti-individualists alike fail to provide a theory of content that explains the subject?s cognitive perspective. I propose an individualist alternative that meets this requirement in conformity with the view that difference in thought-contents needs to be transparent, as does their sameness, if thought-content is to serve to explain the subject?s cognitive perspective.

Scepticism & transcendental arguments: Some methodological reconsiderations

Kant provided two parallel, sound proofs of mental content externalism; both prove this thesis: We human beings could not think of ourselves as persisting through apparent changes in what we (apparently) experience - nor could we think of the apparent spatio-temporal world of objects, events and people - unless in fact we are conscious of some aspects of the actual spatio-temporal world and have at least some rudimentary knowledge of it. Such proofs turn, not on general facts about (or features of) the world, but on appreciating various fundamental regards in which our finite human cognizance depends upon the world we inhabit. The ?transcendental? character of these analyses concerns identifying and appreciating various fundamental features of our finite form of human mindedness, and basic constraints upon, and prospects of, cognitive justification within the non-formal domain of human empirical knowledge. Such analyses and proofs have been developed in various ways, using distinctive strategies, not only by Kant, but also by Hegel, C.I. Lewis, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Frederick Will. Here I examine and defend the methodological reflections required to understand, assess and appreciate such transcendental proofs, and why so few analytic epistemologists have found them persuasive or illuminating.