I was going to put this in my prior post, but think I'll break it out as it really is a separate topic. Jonah in an other critique of Williamson's view of externalism brings up the interesting question of description. Bascially consider Putnam's famous two world experiment. In Williamson's example we have two tiger-like creatures. One is a tiger the other a schmiger. They are identical in all ways except they are unrelated and come from different evolutionary backgrounds. Williamson says that the belief of two people regarding each of these is different. Jonah suggests that if we accept the description theory of reference that Williamson's approach fails to be convincing. After all the descriptions are identical and if beliefs are in terms of descriptions then internalism holds.
I think that Jonah does hit on the possibility that the issue of descriptions and the issue of internalism/externalism are just manifestations of the same issue. (Or at least very closely related) I think this is helpful because it means some of the problems with descriptivism are problems for internalism.
Consider the following example of Putnam. For the average person they can't tell the difference between an elm tree and a beech tree. Their descriptions for each are identical. Yet if you ask this person if beech trees and elm trees are the same they will say no. Why? Because they refer to different trees. Thus the belief "elms have leaves" and the belief "beeches have leaves" are descriptively the same but are not the same belief. This seems a score for the externalist.
I should note an escape to this. There is a difference between the elm and the beech and that is that we describe them as different. Thus in our definition of beech we'd have the description "is not a elm." Is that enough? I'm not sure it is. After all the whole point of descriptivism is to replace names with descriptions. But this description requires appeal to a name. So if our description of beech is that it's not an elm and our description of elm is that it's not a beech, we can't provide a description without names.
Here you give pretty much the same response I gave over on Jonah's blog. Didn't mean to steal it from you--I hadn't read yours yet. :-) I think the descriptivist is almost committed to saying that they have descriptions like "is not an elm," for how else could they consistently believe that 'elm' and 'beech' are different things?
Chris, I'd be interested in seeing how someone who actually is a descriptivist responds. I should bring it up to one of my friends. I halfway wonder if they can't say that while we can replace names with descriptions, the names as a linguistic element are still important. i.e. there is a difference between the mention of a name and the use of a name. So they might say an elm is not called a beech, as a distinction that doesn't end up in regress.
However I'm not sure even that resolves the problem since the distinction isn't just what they are called, but that an elm and a beech aren't the same regardless of what they are called.
I'm sure there are some complex ways to deal with it, but at a certain point the simplicity of the externalist position seems to offer a lot.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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