Abstract
Boghossian’s discrimination argument aims to show that content externalism undermines the privileged access thesis. Simon Dierig has recently proposed a new objection to Boghossian’s argument according to which having a “twater thought” is not an alternative, and a fortiori not a relevant alternative, to possessing a “water thought”. Dierig also considers, and criticizes, a modified version of the discrimination argument which would be immune to his objection. I shall argue, first, that he fails to advance a successful objection to the original version of the argument; and, second, that his criticism of the modified version is misconceived.
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Notes
Dierig is not explicit about what he means by “logical possibility (or impossibility)” in this context. It is clear, however, that if he means the strict logical sense of the term according to which it is logically possible that both p and q are true when p&q is not a logical contradiction, then he needs not to argue against (P3) via constructing a thought experiment. For (P3) would be, given his account of the notion of an alternative, obviously false: the conjunctive proposition that P thinks, at t, that water is wet, and P thinks, at t, that twater is wet is not a logical contradiction. Thus, to have a more charitable reading, I take it that Dierig means by “logical possibility” a more relaxed sense, i.e. metaphysical possibility, which does not render (P3) obviously false. I thank an anonymous referee of the journal for raising this point.
I do not claim that all the causal and communicational relations a subject has previously born to her environment are pertinent to content determination. As I point out in what follows, a causal or a communicational relation between the subject and the environment may be suppressed by a new one in such a way that it no longer plays a role in content fixation.
That the externalists would accept (ii) is evident from their contention that when a subject is switched from earth to twin earth, her thought content does not change immediately, but only after sufficient interaction with the new environment. See, for example, Burge (1988, p. 652), McLaughlin and Tye (1998, p. 351), Brown (2004, p. 313).
Moreover, it seems that Dierig’s treatment of the fifth interpretation (according to which P expresses the broadened belief) deploys the idea that conceivability is a guide to possibility in a way that undermines the intuition that intentional content supervenes on non-intentional facts. According to Dierig, the following two propositions are both conceivable: (a) in the commuter scenario P expresses a single broadened belief, (b) in the commuter scenario P expresses both the water and the twater belief. Dierig then argues that since (a) is conceivable it is also possible (Dierig 2010, p. 82). But if conceivability implies possibility in the case of (a), it must do so in the case of (b) as well. The upshot would be that there are two possible words which are exactly the same up to the level of intentional description, and the commuter scenario takes place in them both, yet in one of them, w1, P expresses the broadened belief in the commuter scenario, while in the other, w2, she expresses the water belief as well as the twater belief in that scenario. But the problem is to explain how w1 and w2 can differ with respect to their intentional facts if they are exactly similar with regard to their non-intentional facts.
Argument (A) is framed in accordance with natural kind externalism. To incorporate social (or linguistic) externalism, the argument should be complemented by the following clause: P has deferred to the English community in her usage of ‘water’ at an earlier time t, and she has deferred to no other community after t. For simplicity, however, I confine myself to natural kind externalism in the subsequent discussion.
Notice that a similar line of argument shows that before departure from earth as well as at the end of the journey, P expresses only the water belief by uttering the sentence “water is wet”. And this is precisely what (ii) would predict.
See, for example, Gibbons (1996) and Burge (1998). Notice that according to this idea, sometimes called ‘the two-concept view’, it is possible for the switching subject to have a water thought and an analogous twater thought simultaneously, one of them based on her memories of the old environment, and the other caused and sustained by experiences from her current environment. Thus, appealing to the two-concept view one can argue that having a twater thought is not an alternative to possessing a water thought, and consequently that premise (P3) is not acceptable. One can therefore achieve the same result for which Dierig argues without being vulnerable to the criticisms stated in the text. As I shall argue in Sect. 3, however, even if premise (P3) could be resisted in either of these two ways, a modified version of that premise still works.
If in addition to the intuition just mentioned in the text, one claims that there is a further intuition to the effect that P was expressing a desire which can be fulfilled only by receiving water, then the second interpretation would be preferred over all its rivals. To rule out the fourth interpretation, however, we do not need this extra claim.
Moreover, it seems that there is a kind of redundancy in Dierig’s line of reasoning, since (Q1) can be plausibly conceded (in the second step) without any need to presuppose the both-concepts thesis.
I would like to thank Hamid Vahid and an anonymous referee of the journal for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Morvarid, M. The Discrimination Argument: A Reply to Dierig. Erkenn 79, 1209–1219 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9595-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9595-4