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Semantic self-knowledge and the vat argument

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Abstract

Putnam’s vat argument is intended to show that I am not a permanently envatted brain. The argument holds promise as a response to vat scepticism, which depends on the claim that I do not know that I am not a permanently envatted brain. However, there is a widespread idea that the vat argument cannot fulfil this promise, because to employ the argument as a response to vat scepticism I would have to make assumptions about the content of the premises and/or conclusion of the argument that beg the question against the sceptic. In this paper, I show that this idea is mistaken.

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Notes

  1. Putnam intended the vat argument as an attack on metaphysical realism. I will not discuss metaphysical realism in this paper, although my defence of the vat argument may be of use to anyone who does want to use it in such an attack.

  2. This idea is present in MacIntyre (1984), Falvey and Owens (1994), Brueckner (1986), David (1991), Wright (1992) and Johnsen (2003). As we shall see, different authors have given the idea different forms.

    It may immediately strike the reader that for a worry about knowing the contents of the premises and/or conclusion of an argument to make sense, the premises and conclusion must be conceived of as things that have content, rather than as things that are content. I address this point in Sect. 1. My thanks to an anonymous Philosophical Studies referee for pushing me to be clear about this.

  3. Byrne (2004, pp. 300–303) makes a similar distinction.

  4. The sceptic might argue for this claim on the grounds that knowledge is closed under known entailment, or on the grounds that for a belief to count as knowledge my evidence must favour that belief over any hypothesis that is incompatible with it. See Brueckner (1994a, b) and Cohen (1998) for comparison of these strategies.

  5. One strategy for resisting the sceptical argument is to argue that this stipulation is not legitimate; see for example Williamson (2000, pp. 164–208). However, for the purposes of this discussion we will grant the stipulation.

  6. There are many different formulations of the vat argument in the literature. Rather than considering the pros and cons of different formulations, I am simply going to give the version of the argument that I wish to defend.

  7. Button (2013), Wright (1992) and Wright & Thorpe (forthcoming) argue at length for their own versions of the vat argument, and much of what they have to say would apply to the version that I give here.

  8. It has been suggested that the claim that semantic self-knowledge is introspective should be understood as meaning that this knowledge literally depends on a kind of inwardly directed observation; for example, this view seems to be implicit in Locke (1960, p. 105). I do not myself think that this is correct, but if it is then my knowledge that I am thinking that I am a BIV could be said to be empirical in the sense that it would depend upon a sort of perception. However, my knowledge of (1) would not thereby depend on the sort of empirical knowledge that the sceptic uses the possibility that I am a BIV to threaten, namely, empirical knowledge of the external world. Thus, the view that self-knowledge depends on inwardly directed observation does not render my assumption that I know (1) question begging as part of a response to the sceptic.

  9. Putnam (1973,1975) used the Twin Earth case to support semantic externalism, the view that the environment of a subject plays a role in determining the referents of his or her words. Others have adapted the argument as I have here to support externalism about thought content; see for example MgGinn (1977).

  10. See Button (2013, pp. 118–121) for a detailed argument that if I were a BIV I could not refer to BIVs. This argument can easily be adapted, mutatis mutandis, to show that if I were a BIV I could not have a concept of a BIV.

  11. This idea appears in Wright (1992, pp. 86–90), Christensen (1993, p. 314) and Brueckner (1999, p. 237).

  12. Tymoczko (1989) and Brueckner (2016) make this point.

  13. Thorpe (2017). See also Wright and Thorpe (forthcoming).

  14. Brueckner (1994a, b) discusses the second objection, but does not offer an answer to it.

  15. Jane MacIntyre (1984), Johnsen (2003) and David (1991) make very similar objections, although the details differ since they discuss different versions of the vat argument.

  16. Button (2013) and Brueckner (2006) make the same point.

  17. See for example Boghossian (1989).

  18. See for example Heil (1988) and Burge (1988) offers a different argument for the compatibility of externalism about thought content and non-empirical knowledge of thought content, and we might equally well have made use of this argument as a response to the current objection to the vat argument.

  19. Note that it is crucial that the second order thought is ‘my thought “water is wet” has the content that water is wet’ if I am to know this. It is my knowledge that it is me stating the content of one of my thoughts that allows me to know that my statement of the content makes use of the same concepts that are involved in the thought whose content I am stating.

  20. My defence of premise (1) involves claiming that non-empirical semantic self-knowledge is compatible with externalism about thought content. However, McKinsey (1991) claims that, jointly held, externalism about thought content and the view that semantic self-knowledge is non-empirical lead to paradox. This prompts the question of whether there is a difference between the reasoning that leads to McKinsey’s paradox and the reasoning of the vat argument, and the question of whether it is possible to solve the paradox whilst preserving the vat argument. These questions are important, but this is not the place to pursue them. See however Wright (2000) and Wright and Thorpe (forthcoming) for an argument that the argument of the McKinsey paradox is vulnerable to a charge of warrant transmission failure which does not afflict the vat argument.

  21. I take the phrase ‘knowledge of comparative content’, along with its definition, from Falvey and Owens (1994).

  22. The point is more usually illustrated by “slow switching” cases of the sort described in Falvey and Owens (1994, pp. 111–112). However, the case I give here better serves the coming objection to the vat argument.

  23. In fact, as Falvey and Owens (1994, pp. 118–112) point out, there are reasons independent of externalism about thought content to think that I do not have non-empirical comparative knowledge of the content of my thoughts. These reasons are developed in more depth in Owens (1990).

  24. Following Wright (1992), I shall adopt the convention of underlining thoughts in the language of BIVs.

  25. Note that this assumes that ‘Twin Earth’ is not an externalist concept. This is plausible if, as in our example, ‘Twin Earth’ is stipulated to be a world covered in XYZ. It would not be so if, as is sometimes the case in the literature, ‘Twin Earth’ is stipulated to be a world without water.

  26. Emphasis in original. Changed from the first-person plural to the first-person singular.

  27. Brueckner (1986, p. 167) raises an objection like this, claiming that all that the vat argument can give me is ‘the metalinguistic knowledge that “I am a BIV” expresses a false proposition, rather than the object language knowledge that I am not a BIV’. However, this objection is raised against a version of the vat argument which explicitly aims to prove the truth of a certain sentence. I will not defend the version of the vat argument that Brueckner attacks in this paper.

  28. Brueckner (2006, p. 439) replies to Johnsen by asserting that the BIV mentioned in the conclusion of the vat argument is not an illusory BIV. Although Brueckner is no doubt correct, the current point is that it would be question begging for me to presume to know this in the course of a response to scepticism.

  29. This strategy is put forward on behalf of the sceptic in Nagel (1986) and Pritchard and Ranilli (2016). Wright (1992, p. 93) also gives voice to the worry that there might yet be some scenario that I cannot entertain when he says that the ‘real basis’ for dissatisfaction with the vat argument is that ‘the real spectre to be exorcised concerns the idea of a thought standing behind our thought that we are not brains-in-a-vat, in just the way that our thought that they are mere brains-in-a-vat would stand behind the thought—could they indeed think anything—of actual brains-in-a-vat that “we are not brains-in-a-vat”’. However, it should be noted that the thought with which Wright is concerned is not one which would falsify most of my empirical beliefs. Rather, it is a thought according to which my empirical beliefs are mostly true, and yet I lack the capacity to think about reality as it fundamentally is. Thus, whatever the threat that the possibility of the thought with which Wright is concerned might present, it is not a threat to the claim that I have empirical knowledge, as the (putative) thought with which we are here concerned is intended to be.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Crispin Wright, Peter Sullivan, Adrian Haddock, David Horst and Bernhard Salow for helpful discussion. This paper benefited greatly from being presented at a Philosophy Work in Progress Seminar at the University of Campinas, a Knowledge Beyond Natural Science Project Seminar at Stirling University, and a Philosophy of Language Group Seminar at Edinburgh University. I would like to thank all three audiences for their comments. An anonymous referee at Philosophical Studies also provided comments which have greatly improved the paper. I am grateful for a research grant from the São Paulo Research Foundation (Grant ID No. 2016/03277-1) that allowed me to complete this paper.

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Thorpe, J.R. Semantic self-knowledge and the vat argument. Philos Stud 176, 2289–2306 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1126-3

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