Externalism, self-knowledge and memory

This chapter discusses Paul Boghossian's ‘memory argument’ for the incompatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. The argument raises the question of whether or not, assuming externalism, the contents of our past thoughts are accessible to us through memory. I concede that there is a sense in which memory does not give us access to the contents of our past thoughts if externalism holds. However, I argue that, in the relevant sense, the view that the contents of our past thoughts are inaccessible to memory cannot be used to establish incompatibilism through the memory argument. Drawing on some tools from two-dimensional (2D) semantics, I suggest that one of the premises in the argument trades on an ambiguity between two notions of mental content. In this chapter I will discuss a certain use that has been made of the notion of memory to motivate incompatibilism in the literature on externalism and self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is understood in this literature as the view that our beliefs regarding our thoughts enjoy a special type of epistemic justification; special in that we are not supposed to rely on either reasoning or empirical evidence for such beliefs. Externalism is understood as the view that thinking something is a matter of being related to some objects or substances in our environment (as opposed to having some intrinsic property). We may abbreviate this by saying that the contents of our thoughts ‘depend on’ certain environmental conditions. The incompatibilist position is that externalism and self-knowledge cannot both be correct: how can we have any sort of epistemically special access to the contents of our own thoughts if those contents really depend on our environment? After all, whether we are on, let us say, Earth or Twin Earth, is not something that we can determine without substantial empirical investigation and reasoning. Paul Boghossian has been a prominent advocate of incompatibilism. One of his incompatibilist arguments was originally meant as a response to Tyler Burge's account of self-knowledge, but the argument has received much attention in its own right. Boghossian's argument relies on some views about the content of memories, and it has sparked a debate on the proper understanding of memory within an externalist framework.Jordi Fernande