This is the third in some thoughts about externalism. My earlier comments are here and here. Last time I mentioned some of the confusions in externalism along with some of the aims. Today I want to get at a problem of content externalism. (The idea that mental states partially depend upon things external to the body or mind) Now content externalism basically is aiming at the common sense notion that our thoughts are about entities. Thus to speak of our thoughts and to neglect what they are about is really to miss something important about thought. I consider myself an externalist in this sense. However it is important to realize an interesting implication of this. If the mental is partially dependent upon what is external to my body then can I have privileged access to mental states?
Privilged access has a long history in philosophy. Consider my experience of being in pain. Now it seems fair to argue that no matter how much analysis of ones brain one does, one can't ever be completely sure that the experience of pain I have is exactly the same as the experience an other has. Oh, we might notice the brain is in the proper physical state with the proper environment. But do we really know what the experience is like? It seems like there is this "inward" nature of feeling that can't be captured by an external analysis. There is something "special" about it.
You've probably heard this argument before. It is sometimes presented as how to explain the taste of salt to someone who's never experienced salt before. But it is taken one step further. If you can't explain that, how do we know any experiences are the same?
The reason all this poses a problem for externalism is that the externalist would say that two people in identical bodily states but with the rest of the world different would not have the same mental states. But if they wouldn't have the same mental states then how would they distinguish them? They couldn't. That sense of having a special privileged access to mental states would be lost. A person outside of their brain might know better what they are feeling than they do.
That doesn't seem obvious at first read. So let me explain it. Consider you think you are in a certain kind of pain. Yet, because you don't know the outside environment, it may be that you are actually in a different kind of experience than you actually are. Put an other way, people outside might know better than you what you are feeling. Needless to say that seems very counter-intuitive to many people. Indeed it is one of the big reasons why people aren't externalists.
One rejoinder to this complaint is that it confuses epistemological issues (knowing that one is in a state) with metaphysical (whether such things are possible). However that's not that good a response since it seems like metaphysical claims can produce epistemological limits. The issue isn't so much justification than outright metaphysical possibility.
My own view is that there ought not be any worry about all this. It seems intuitive that we ought be able to know what mental state a person is in if a person actually is a material being. Further, if one takes a more extreme form of externalism, then perhaps our focus on the brain as the full seat of the mental is simply misplaced. We wish to assume an individualization that isn't true. That is the lesson of externalism in this reading is that we are more than our brains or bodies and that part of us can't be separated out from the rest of the world. i.e. a metaphysical holism of self. Of course many will understandably cringe at that notion.
Just to add to the above. Regarding the problem of whether my pain is the same as your pain. I think we have to distinguish knowing that one is in a mental state such as pain from knowing the feeling of being in that mental state. I may well be wrong here, but I think the distinction is between that of a proposition and that of an experience. The argument about internalism and externalism is more about the content of mental states and thus propositions and not "feel."
However having said that I think the issue of the "feel" of a mental state is a good one. I'm not quite sure how to respond there beyond admitting that I've always though the "feel" of it was inner and thus not external. Yet if we adopt a thoroughgoing monism of some sort, that belief may be difficult to hold up. i.e. what would distinguish my feeling from yours?
Couldn't one allow the external world to fix the propositional content of mental states, whilst retaining a purely 'internal' theory of their qualitative character (or 'qualia')?
I think anyone who believes that the qualitative character of experience is determined either purely internally or purely externally is going to have a rough time accounting for that qualitative character, at least within a physicalist framework. It's probably better to take the position that the qualitative character of experience arises from a world-body interaction. I think you get something like this in the sensori-motor account of visual experience of O'Reagan and Noe or Damasio's account of qualia in The Feeling of What Happens for instance. In those, the content of visual experience is largely determined by the outside world, but the qualitative character is determined by that content and the body's reaction to it (which will differ depending on the body's overall state at the moment the content becomes conscious).
But the whole argument of internalism is that if we could take just the internal state of the body (thus the reaction) that two people would be in the same mental state regardless of what is going on externally. Admittedly a lot of the arguments for this tend to get silly. Putnam's example, for instance, is impossible. Although that paper I mentioned in my first post, "What Is Externalism," does a good job correcting and critiquing it. If the way it is determined is simply external causation then you've really adopted internalism, as I see it. If you say that mental properties can't be limited to the "internal" (whether of a body, a brain, or some dualist substance) then you embrace externalism.
Of course one could well argue (and I think this is where you're going) that one can't eliminate the causal influences. Say that we are talking about vision. One might say that the experience of vision isn't just the brain and the initial signals going from the eye nerves. There is more and the environment would change things subtly - say via a magnetic or electric field.
I don't think that's what most externalists are getting at. Rather I think their basic argument is that intentional states must logically include the object of the intention. Even if, as in the Continental perspective, one seriously rethinks intentionality, I think the "other" still affects the mental. (Not to mention undermines the internal/external divide)
The one way out, as I see it, is for an internalist to adopt something like direct realism. In a way, it seems like the externalist is really after something like direct realism but with the recognition that a naive direct realism like the Scots around the time of Reid held, is hard to subscribe to.
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