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Thought and Syntax

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

William Seager
William Seager*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Psychological Externalism (PE) is the view that the contents of intentional psychological states are determined by factors external to the subject of those states. For example, PE holds that the content of a belief will be established at least in part by features of the environment, broadly construed, around and more or less detached from the believer. The range of such external factors is quite large, and various forms of PE emerge depending on which sorts of factors are endorsed. Generally speaking, these factors are those that establish the reference of the terms used to specify the contents of psychological states. To convey the flavour of this doctrine, let me briefly review some of the candidate external factors.

Type
Part XII. Issues in the Philosophy of Psychology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1992 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1992 , 1992 , pp. 481 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

I would like to thank several people for their help with this paper: Deborah Brown, Tori McGeer, Bob Murray, Bill Munroe, Janice Porteous, Ted Snider and the philosophers of Dalhousie University.

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