Causal efficacy and externalist mental content

Internalism about mental content is the view that microphysical duplicates must be mental duplicates as well. This dissertation develops and defends the idea that only a strong version of internalism is compatible with our commonsense commitment to mental causation. Chapter one defends a novel necessary condition on a property's being causally efficacious - viz., that any property F that is efficacious with respect to event E cannot be instantiated in virtue of any property G that is itself ceteris paribus sufficient for E -- and shows that that necessary condition vindicates the idea that externalism is incompatiblewith our commonsense commitment to mental causation. The internalist's core intuition is that only intrinsic properties can be causally efficacious. Chapter two defends that intuition from the common externalist response that extrinsic properties abound. A popular "Middle Way" between externalism and internalism holds that although ordinary, "folk-psychological" contents of prepositional attitudes are extrinsic, there exists some other non-folk-psychological kind of content that is intrinsic. Chapter three argues that Jerry Fodor's influential argument for the Middle Way is incoherent. Chapter four identifies a weak but popular grade of internalism, endorsed by John Searle among others, and argues that it is untenable.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Newman, Anthony E. (Anthony Edison), 1970-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alex Byrne.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8147
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8147

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8147