Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of Content

The question of content externalism’s compatibility with a plausible account of self-knowledge has been the subject of much debate in recent years. If the very content of my thoughts depends on external factors beyond me, factors that can only be known a posteriori, what happens to the traditional assumption that we know our own thoughts directly, without having to rely on any empirical investigations of the environment?

Two decades ago, Tyler Burge presented what has become the standard compatibilist reply to this challenge.¹ Burge focused on a certain class of judgments, what he calls ‘basic self-knowledge,’ such as I think (with this very thought) that water is wet. Exploiting the fact that reflexive judgments of this sort reemploy the content of the first-order thought, such that no ‘content mistakes’ are possible, Burge argued that externalism is perfectly compatible with the traditional view that we know our own thoughts directly and authoritatively. Ever since, compatibilists and incompatibilists have fought a battle royale over whether Burge’s reply is satisfactory.² Compatibilists have relied on the fact that the reflexive judgments, or ‘cogito-judgments,’ are self-verifying, whereas incompatibilists have tried to show that even if no content mistakes are possible, externalism implies that there is a sense in which the subject does not know the content of her thought.

In the paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived, since it is based on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content.’ I shall be making three claims. The first is that there are reasons to question the fruitfulness of the current debate concerning the compatibility of externalism and basic self-knowledge. Although compatibilists are right to insist that content externalism cannot threaten the knowledge we have of our own occurrent thoughts, incompatibilists are equally right to suggest that this reply fails to address the real problem. The incompatibilists are mistaken, however, in assuming that the real problem is epistemological. My second claim is that the proper question to ask is whether externalism can provide a plausible account of understanding or concept grasp. Grasping a concept or a content is sometimes characterized in terms of ‘knowledge of content’; but, I argue, such ‘knowledge’ cannot be construed as a form of propositional knowledge, on pain of a regress. My final claim is that externalists have notorious difficulties giving a plausible account of understanding. This, I argue, is a direct result of the fact that externalism depends on the assumption that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts.³ According to the content externalist one can be in a position to knowingly self-ascribe a thought that one does not understand. This, I propose, identifies the real source behind the incompatibilist’s intuition that appealing to the self-verifying nature of the cogito-thoughts is unsatisfactory.

Over the years, ‘externalism’ (or, sometimes, ‘anti-individualism’) has come to denote a variety of theses. This is unfortunate since it has led people to neglect some important distinctions. Here I wish to stress one such important distinction: That between externalism construed as a thesis within foundational semantics, as a thesis about the determination of content and meaning, and externalism construed as a semantic theory, a theory concerning the semantic value of a term (or a concept).⁴ Most commonly, externalism is understood in the first way, as providing an answer to what determines the meaning of my words and the content of my thoughts. And what is distinctive about foundational externalism, of course, is the claim that the determination basis includes external facts (such as facts about the individual’s social or physical environment), and not just internal ones (such as brain states).⁵ This is the type of externalism that Burge defends and that figures in the discussion concerning (Burgean) basic self-knowledge. It is also the type of externalism that is the focus of this paper. Externalism construed as a semantic theory, by contrast, tells us what the semantic value of a term (concept) is, not what that term (concept) has that semantic value in virtue...