Abstract
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne have recently presented a thought experiment—Mirror Man—designed to refute internalist theories of belief and content. We distinguish five ways in which the case can be interpreted and argue that on none does it refute internalism.
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Notes
While not all internalists will understand belief as a psychological state according to which many propositions are true, this is exactly how Lewis understands it; see, e.g., the discussion of ‘bogus plurals’ in Lewis (1994).
Chalmers (2018) makes a similar point when he says that in response to Mirror Man “one might follow Kant in arguing that there is some sort of qualitative difference between left and right as physical relations, so that a left glove and a corresponding right glove are not qualitative duplicates of each other. On a view of this sort, Mirror Man's two thoughts will not be qualitative duplicates of each other, and the argument will be blocked”. Chalmers goes on to note that YH might move to a different version of the Mirror Man case to avoid this possibility, but that would be to develop the case in one of the other four ways we describe in the text.
In the passage we quoted at the outset, YH say that ‘left’ and ‘right’ are “only placeholders; the sides could just as well be distinguished by being top and bottom, or by being closer to and farther from the sun, or by any other extrinsic features” (2018, 76). But this does not undermine the point made in the text. First, the same thing applies in the case of top/bottom as applies in the case of left/right. Second, in the case in which the two sides of Mirror Man are distinguished by being closer or further from a point internal to him, there will be an intrinsic difference between the two sides. Third, in the case in which the two sides are distinguished by being closer or further from some external object, such as the sun, we need to ask how the two beliefs are associated with these two sides. If the two sides constitute distinct subjects of the beliefs, then the case is similar to third way below of taking the example; if the two sides contain different sentences that are identical with distinct token beliefs, then the case is similar to the fifth way.
For more on the idea behind this version of the case, and for further critical discussion of Mirror Man that is consonant with ours, see Hattiangadi (2019).
One may adopt this view without moving away from Lewis’s view as stated above. It would simply be that the set of individuals that constitute the content of the belief are sets of individual (token) beliefs rather than individual believers.
This is a single belief one might have in the Chalmers version of the two-tubes case. If one were interested in Austin’s original version, the subject would have a single belief that is true if and only if either there are two red things in front of them or there is a single red thing in front of them; what they are wondering, and what it is rational to wonder in the circumstances, is which of these things is the case.
References
Austin, D. F. (1990). What’s the meaning of “this”? Cornell University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2018). Review of Yli-Vakkuri, J and Hawthorne, J., Narrow content. Oxford University Press. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/narrow-content/
Hattiangadi, A. (2019). In defense of narrow content. Analysis, 79(3), 539–550. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anz029
Lewis, D. (1979). Attitudes de dicto and de se. Philosophical Review, 88, 513–543
Lewis, D. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan (Ed.), 1994 A companion to the philosophy of mind. (pp. 412–431). Blackwell.
Yli-Vakkuri, J., & Hawthorne, J. (2018). Narrow content. Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to members of ANU's Philosophy of Mind work-in-progress group, and several anonymous referees.
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Jackson, F., Stoljar, D. Reflections on Mirror Man. Philos Stud 178, 4227–4237 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01645-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01645-w