jackson - review of stalnaker's our knowledge of the internal world

8/13/2019 Jackson - Review of Stalnaker's Our Knowledge of the Internal World

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BOOK REVIEWS

Our Knowledge of the Internal World. robert c. stalnaker. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2008. vi1

148 p. Cloth $39.95, paper $22.95.

What happens to some long-standing philosophical questions whenyou approach them informed by externalist insights? Robert Stalnakergives us his answer to this question for the problem of induction, themeaning of proper names, the metaphysics of color, Putnams para-dox, the absolute conception of reality, the challenge to materialismfrom the knowledge argument, self-locating beliefs, Kripkes Pierre, andwhat to say about identity statements formed out of different names,

for example, Hesperus5 Phosphorus.Well, not quite. In the first chap-ter, he gives us a sketch of the contrasting approaches of internalistsand externalists to some of these problems, and in later chapters hegives detailed treatments of some of these problems with some refer-ence to the contrast between internalist and externalist approachesmentioned in the beginning, but what he says in the later chapters islargely self-supporting. You could read them with profit without havingread the first chapter. For example, much of his discussion of KripkesPierre example, the debate over the right theory of reference for proper

names, and self-locating beliefs (beliefs about what time it is and whereone is, for example) is framed as a kind of argumentative dialogue be-tween himself as the externalist and David Lewis as the internalist, butit makes perfect sense outside that context.

Stalnaker uses the term internalism loosely, as he himself notes.He does not mean by it one specific doctrine but rather a certainattitude that manifests itself in different but related ways, dependingon the problem at hand. When induction is the topic, internalists seekto answer the skeptic starting from the contents of their own minds,

and they only allow themselves recourse to how the world we findourselves in is after belief in it has been justified starting from theCartesian base. By contrast, externalists propose that we beginwith the world we find ourselves in, and with what common sense orour best scientific theories tell us about it(3). When color is the topic,internalists think of color as being, in one way or another, a projectionfrom our sensory nature onto the world. Externalists, by contrast, startby taking color to be a property of an objective world that we are ableto detect. The distinction between looking red and being red enters

the story only after we find that our ability to discriminate colors is

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0022-362X/10/0712/659663 2010 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.


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fallible. We need, therefore, to acknowledge that sometimes the inter-nal state that underlies our ability to detect colors occurs in the absenceof the property it is designed to detect. Externalists (and Stalnaker) do

not deny that looking red has an epistemological priorityour knowl-edge of color depends on some of us, some of the time, not beingcolor-blindwhat they deny is that it is conceptually prior (see muchof p. 9).

So the reader is presented with, as Stalnaker puts it, a big picturecontrast: the contrast between starting with the contents of our mindsand moving out into the world versus starting with the world as wefind it and noting divergences between it and how our minds repre-sent it, as occasion demands. It is important to note, however, that the

kind of internalism he opposes is framed in terms ofprivate objects,the myth of the given, the ghost in the machine, the Cartesiantheater,and things present to the mind(I take these phrases fromp. 1). This makes it a very Cartesian kind of internalismthe termi-nology may be unfaithful to the real Descartes, but, like Stalnaker, Iam reluctant to discard a useful tag. This is fair enough. As Stalnakerrightly notes, despite the arguments of Ryle, Quine, Wittgenstein,Sellars, and Davidson, which led him to reject the Cartesian pictureas Stalnaker puts it, he is still mired in the philosophical mindset

of the twentieth century (2)there has of late been something of arevival of Cartesianism. So he is not giving himself a straw target. Allthe same, this invites the reader to ask a question. When, for example,Stalnaker discusses and opposes the description theory of reference forproper names, seeing it as an internalist theory and the direct refer-ence theory as an externalist one, is the description theory internalistin any stronglyCartesiansense?

This question becomes urgent when we recall that, as we observeabove, Lewis is the chosen spokesperson for the description theory.

By most marks, Lewis is not a Cartesian. Stalnaker is sensitive to thisissue and says even though at least some of the post-Kripkean neo-descriptivists would disclaim any allegiance to a Cartesian project, Ithink that intuitions from that project play a role in motivating de-fenses of this account of reference, and that it is useful to see theparallel between the Kripkean critique and the kind of externalistproject promoted by Sellars and Quine (11). I think, as a supporterof the description theory, that Stalnaker is right that intuitions fromthe Cartesian project play a role in motivating the neo-descriptivist

account. More precisely, there is one internalist intuition in particularthat makes many neo-descriptivists deny the direct reference accountof the proposition expressed by sentences of the form N is F. Therest of this review will be concerned with saying what that intuition is.

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My concern will be identification, not judgment, but I will say enoughto indicate why one might go along with the intuition.

The intuition in question becomes clear when one reads the dia-

logue, adverted to earlier, between Stalnaker and Lewis over KripkesPierre, but I will approach the point via a less-encumbered example.Suppose astronomers become convinced, rightly, that there is exactlyone asteroid in region Rof the solar system. Perhaps the instrumentsattached to their radio telescopes detect it and give information aboutits location. They then, guided by this information, point their opticaltelescopes towards region Rand are able to see the asteroid. Theydecide to rehabilitate the name Vulcan and use it to name the as-teroid. The astronomers are interested in Vulcans composition. They

ascertain that it is composed of a single heavy, soft metal. Furtherwork tells them that the metal is either lead or gold but that thereis currently no way to tell which. They report this somewhat unsatis-factory situation in sentences like Vulcan is either made of lead orgold (but not both); It is a toss-up whether Vulcan is made of goldor is made of lead; and so on. Newspapers report the situation usingsentences like Although astronomers are confident that Vulcan is inR, they have been unable to determine its composition.

What propositions are being expressed by these sentences con-

taining the name Vulcan? This is in part a question about the termproposition,but one (one) way to read the question is as a questionabout the kind of world we are being said to occupy. Stalnaker hasbeen one of the most powerful advocates of the idea that (typically)a declarative sentence, S, represents the world we occupy as being acertain way, and that we can capture this with the set of possibleworlds which are alike in being as Srepresents our world to be whilediffering in matters about whichSis silent. So, what worlds are as, say,Vulcan is either made of lead or gold,in the mouths of our astron-

omers, represents our world to be? The obvious externalist, directreference answer is the set of worlds where Vulcan, the object itself,is sometimes made of lead and sometimes made of goldthat is, insome of the worlds it is made of gold and in others it is made of lead.The trouble, of course, is that this is impossible. Given that the com-position of an object is an essential property of it, Vulcan cannot bemade of gold in some worlds while being made of lead in others.Or, take the sentence Vulcan is in R, and suppose that Vulcan isin fact made of gold. The set of worlds where Vulcan is in R will

be a sub-set of the worlds where something made of gold is in R. Thisfits uneasily with the astronomers insistence that they have no ideawhether Vulcan is made of gold or of lead. They want, in usingVulcanis in R, to affirm that of which they are confident yet remain silent

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on the matter about which they are ignorant. Somehow, externalism,or anyway the direct reference manifestation of it has stopped themfrom doing this.

It might be thought that the distinction between what is meta-physically possible and what is conceptually possible helps to meetthe problem. (I do not think, though, that Stalnaker would go downthis track, given his view, which I share, that we should not think ofmetaphysical possibility as a restricted kind of possibility.) It is, it mightbe said, conceptually possible for Vulcan not to be made of gold. Thetrouble, however, arises from the fact that it is conceptually impossiblefor Vulcan to vary in its composition as we go from world to world.

Alternatively, it might be thought that what we have here is simply

one (good) message of externalism. We should reject the idea that wehave infallible, a prioriaccess to what our words mean or to the con-tents of the beliefs we express using those words. That is a hangoverfrom Cartesianism. I think (think) this is what Stalnaker would say.However, the trouble under discussion is not generated by dubioustheses about infallible, a prioriaccess to meanings and contents. It isgenerated by the supposition that, by and large, people know whatthey are saying about how things are when they use relatively simplesentences like Vulcan is in R or Vulcan is either made of lead or

gold. This supposition is supported by the manifest usefulness ofcoming across such sentences in navigating and learning about theworld we inhabit. Dont the astronomers know that the contents oftheir Vulcan-expressed beliefs and sentences leave open Vulcanscomposition? After all, they say, perhaps with a good deal of emphasis,that they do not know Vulcans composition.

At this point, the externalist might have recourse to Stalnakerswell-known diagonalization strategy in order to capturewhat is conveyedby the astronomers. (Thanks here to Daniel Stoljar.) That strategy

generates a set of possibilities associated with, for example, Vulcanis inR,which do not each contain Vulcan. But our topic is not labels.Call what we are talking about the content, the semantic value, whatis conveyed, the proposition expressed, or . It remains the case thatthe externalist answer would seem the wrong one for capturing howour astronomers say and believe things to be when they use thesentence Vulcan is in R.

I promised to identify the key internalist intuition that leads de-scription theorists to reject the direct reference account of proper

names that emerges from Stalnakers discussion. It is an intuitionabout the correct methodology for our astronomers to follow, themethodology that underpins the thought we have just been discuss-ing, the thought that it is a mistake to model how they take our world

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to be when they use Vulcanby using worlds, each of which containsVulcan. The problem, we may suppose, that confronted our astrono-mers was that they had no prior reason to expect an asteroid in region

Rto be made of gold rather than lead, or the reverse (if that is toohard to believe, we could change the details of the example). As aresult, they had to depend on the readings of their instruments, alongwith their perceptual experiences, to discriminate between Vulcansbeing made of lead and Vulcans being made of gold, and the read-ings and experiences failed to do this. Their best theories about theworld we inhabit predicted exactly the same readings and experienceson the hypothesis that Vulcan is made of gold and on the hypothesisthat Vulcan is made of lead. The astronomers had no available argu-

ment to the best explanation to tell them which way to jump. Bycontrast, even if they had no prior reason to expect there to be oneasteroid rather than two in R, they were confident, we may suppose,that had there been two this would have shown up, in one way oranother, in the readings, and maybe their experience would havebeen of two points of light rather than one. They could, therefore,conclude that there was just the one asteroid in R.

These brief remarks about methodology make a substantive as-sumption: that there would be something deeply misguided in object-

ing that the readings wouldhave been different had Vulcan beenmade of lead instead, as we supposed, of gold. For, in that case, theywould have been readings caused by something made of lead. Like-wise, the astronomers experiences would have been different; theywould have been caused by something made of lead instead of gold.The key internalist intuition is that there is something deeply mis-guided about this objection.

This book comes down to us from Stalnakers Locke lectures atOxford and, more distantly, his Whitehead lectures at Harvard.

Those lectures must have been very stimulating and informative.frank jackson

The Australian National University andPrinceton University

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jackson - review of stalnaker's our knowledge of the internal world

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