Narrow Content

By: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, John Hawthorne

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Hardcover | 7 June 2018

At a Glance

Hardcover
222 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.62 x 16.0 x 2.03

Hardcover

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It is natural to distinguish, for any thinking creature, those events and states that are internal to the creature -- its brain states, for example -- from those that are not. Narrow mental content, if there is such a thing, is content that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker. A central question in the philosophy of mind since the mid-1970s has been whether there is a kind of mental content that is narrow in this sense. One important line of thought -- by 'externalists' -- has been that so-called intentional states, such as wishing that they sky were blue and believing that the sky is blue, are, perhaps surprisingly, not internal: there could be twins who are exactly alike on the inside but differ with respect to such intentional states. In the face of this wave of externalism, many philosophers have argued that there must be some good sense in which our intentional states are internal after all, and that such narrow content can play various key
explanatory roles relating, inter alia, to epistemology and the explanation of action. This book argues that this is a forlorn hope, and defends a thoroughgoing externalism. The entanglement of our minds with the external world runs so deep that no internal component of mentality can easily be cordoned off.

Industry Reviews

This important book on narrow content is presented as a third act in what might be called the Twin Earth Wars ... the next-generation externalists Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne aim to strike down internalists on behalf of the empire once and for all, deploying the awesome weapon Mirror Man to give an argument that narrow content is impossible ... Philosophers on both sides of the issue can be grateful to Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne for invigorating a debate that had been threatening to go stale, and for setting an agenda for further work. * David J. Chalmers, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
This is a book for students and scholars of philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology... Recommended. * CHOICE *
This is one of the most convincing philosophy books I have read in a long time. It takes a widely held constellation of views, lays them out with admirable clarity, and patiently reduces them to rubble. * Jeff Speaks, University of Notre Dame *

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