Externalism and the Memory Argument

Paul Boghossian’s ‘Memory Argument ’ allegedly shows, using the familiar slow-switching sce-nario, that externalism and authoritative self-knowledge are incompatible. The aim of this paper is to undermine the argument by examining two distinct externalist responses. I demonstrate that the Memory Argument equivocates on the notion of forgetting. Since Hilary Putnam presented the Twin Earth case in ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’ (1975), the doctrine of externalism has held considerable interest for philosophers of mind and language. At first glance, externalism is incom-patible with our ordinary conception of authoritative self-knowledge because, according to externalism, the contents of our mental states conceptually depend on external factors about which we do not have authoritative knowl-edge. Although a number of philosophers have attempted resolutions of this apparent incompatibility, Paul Boghossian (1989) introduces the ‘Memory Argument ’ in order to place a further obstacle in the way of “compatibilism”, as it is often called. He argues that slow-switching, which Tyler Burge (1988) introduces with the intention of illustrating the compatibility of externalism and authoritative self-knowledge, can demonstrate their incompatibility instead. Boghossian’s influential argument has not only deepened the discus-sion of the relationship between externalism and authoritative self-knowledge, but also revealed another aspect of the issue: externalism and the nature of memory. The purpose of this paper is to undermine the Memory Argument by show-ing that it equivocates on the notion of forgetting. In Section 1, I introduce the Memory Argument. In Section 2, I discuss two externalist responses to th