Abstract: Social externalism implies that many competences are not personal assets separable from social and cultural environments but complex states of affairs involving individuals and persisting features of social reality. The paper explores the consequences for competence identity over time and across contexts, and hence for the predictive role usually accorded to competences

Abstract: Over the last century, as Figure 1 graphically illustrates, scientific investigations have given us a detailed account of many natural phenomena, from molecules to manic depression, through so-called ‘mechanistic’, or ‘functional’, explanations based upon our understanding of the entities that compose these phenomena.1 Given their importance, there has unsurprisingly been a long tradition of philosophical research on mechanistic explanations.2 And this work has played an especially important role in debates over reduction, since non-reductivists, such as Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, William Wimsatt and Philip Kitcher, have all used detailed scientific evidence about the compositional relations posited between properties in mechanistic explanations, or so-called ‘realization’ relations, to show the Nagelian model of reduction, and its semantic descendents, all face grave problems.3 In various ways, these writers have all used the widespread phenomenon of multiple realization to show that we cannot plausibly establish the Nagelian’s required bridge laws or identity statements, and that we also have good reasons to believe that special science predicates are indispensable, contrary to the claims of such reductive positions

Abstract: There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content (which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation I argue that one can underwrite such externalist theories within a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment to making her _own_ beliefs and applications consistent allows one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically individualistic. Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand languages as shared temporally extended practices about which they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs. Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite 'non-individualistic' ascriptions..

Abstract: ‘Epistemic’ theories of vagueness notoriously claim that (despite the appearances to the contrary) all of our vague terms have sharp boundaries; it’s just that we can’t know what they are. Epistemic theories are typically criticized for failing to explain (1) the source of the ignorance postulated, and (2) how our terms could come to have such precise boundaries. Both of these objections will, however, be shown to rest on certain ‘presentist’ assumptions about the relation between use and meaning, and once these assump- tions are rejected, the possibility of a new sort of ‘normative epistemicism’ will emerge

Abstract: Vagueness has always been a problem for philosophers. This is true in a number of ways. One obvious way is that the vagueness inherent in much philosophical discourse has always lead to problems in the interpretation and criticism of philosophical arguments. This is a way in which the vagueness of language causes problems for philosophers. (We can call this “the practical problem of vagueness.”) However, in addition to the problems that vagueness causes, there is also the more general problem that the mere existence of vagueness causes philosophical problems of its own. (We can call this “the theoretical problem of vagueness.”) These problems were first presented in Aristotle’s time in a form that is typically referred to as the sorites paradox.254 Sorites arguments run roughly as follows

Abstract: Ascriptions of content are sensitive not only to our physical and social environment, but also to unforeseeable developments in the subsequent usage of our terms. The paper argues that the problems that may seem to come from endorsing such 'temporally sensitive' ascriptions either already follow from accepting the socially and historically sensitive ascriptions Burge and Kripke appeal to, or disappear when the view is developed in detail. If one accepts that one's society's past and current usage contributes to what one's terms mean, there is little reason not to let its future usage to do so as well

Abstract: Social externalism is the view that the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are logically determined at least in part by her linguistic community's standards for the use of her words. If social externalism is correct, its importance can hardly be overemphasized. The traditional Cartesian view of psychological states as essentially first personal and non-relational in character, which has shaped much theorizing about the nature of psychological explanation, would be shown to be deeply flawed

Abstract: Tyler Burge has argued that an incorrect understanding of a word can be sufficient for possessing the concept the word literally expresses. His well-known 'arthritis' case involves a patient who understands 'arthritis' incorrectly, but who nevertheless, according to Burge, possesses the concept arthritis. Critics of Burge have objected that there is an alternative concept that best matches the patient's understanding and that this, therefore, is the patient's concept. The paper first argues that Burge's response to this objection is unconvincing. A better response is then developed. It is argued that there is no alternative concept that matches the incorrect understanding, since the patient thinks he has a partial understanding. This, together with points about ordinary psychological explanation and modes of presentations of concepts, establish that it is impossible to undermine Burge's social externalism by appealing to the idea that an alternative concept matches the incorrect understanding

Abstract: in T. Marvan (ed) What Determines Content? The Internalism/Externalism Dispute, Cambridge Scholar Press, Newcastle upon Tyne, 39-54, 2006