The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Howard Robinson (CEU)
on
Burge on 'Constitutive dependence': why he fails to reconcile
anti-individualism about mental content with the literal
internality of mental states.
Tuesday, 22 November, 2011, 4.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
Some people think that externalism is the thesis that mental states consist, in part, of things outside our heads, so that the mental states themselves are literally partly external. Burge denies this, saying that externalism only claims that the existence of certain external objects is a necessary condition for internal mental states to have the content they do. In this paper I try to show why this apparently innocuous form of externalism cannot cope with introspective self-knowledge. Time permitting, I shall discuss arguments from Searle, Stalnaker and Lewis, as well as from Burge.