Asa Maria Wikforss

During the last decade Jessica Brown has been one of the main participants in the on-going debate over the compatibility of anti-individualism and self-knowledge. It is therefore of great interest that she is now publishing a book examining the various epistemological consequences of anti-individualism. The book is divided into three sections. The first discusses the question of whether a subject can have privileged access to her own thoughts, even if the content of her thoughts is construed anti-individualistically. This section contains a detailed and useful discussion not only of how we are to understand privileged access, but also of epistemological issues of more general import, such as the connection between knowledge and reliability. The second section focuses on various aspects of the problem of anti-individualism and reasoning, including an extensive discussion of the relation between anti-individualism and a Fregean account of content. The final section discusses the so-called reductio argument against compatibilism (i.e. the view that anti-individualism is compatible with a priori knowledge of one’s own thoughts), according to which compatibilism implies that we can have a priori knowledge of certain facts about the world that, intuitively, are not knowable that way. The book is very clearly written and structured. Readers unfamiliar with the debate will get a good sense of its broad contours and the various positions taken. Brown starts out by distinguishing different forms of anti-individualism. This is very helpful since it is quite clear that the term has come to be rather carelessly used, as if it referred to one particular thesis, whereas in fact a number of loosely related positions are labeled ‘antiindividualist’. At the outset she distinguishes three familiar anti-individualist theses: natural kind anti-individualism, social anti-individualism, and singular anti-individualism. These..

The question of whether content externalism poses a threat to the traditional view of self-knowledge has been much debated. Compatibilists have tried to diffuse the threat by appealing to the self-verifying character of reflexive judgments about our own thoughts, while incompatibilists have strenuously objected that this does not suffice. In my paper I argue that this debate is fundamentally misconceived since it is based, on both sides, on the problematic notion of ‘knowledge of content’. What this shows, I argue, is not that content externalism is unobjectionable, but that the real challenge to content externalism is not an epistemological one. The real difficulty concerns the content externalist’s seemingly necessary commitment to the idea that individuals have an incomplete grasp of the concepts that go into their own thoughts. This idea poses a threat not to self-knowledge, I argue, but rather to our first- and second-order reasoning abilities.

The thesis examines a central and controversial question in the philosophy of mind and language: Is meaning normative? Are there rules we must follow for our words to have meaning? ;Philosophers are sharply divided over this question. One side, often associated with Wittgenstein and more recently Kripke, sees meaning as essentially normative. If a sign is to be meaningful, then surely, it is argued, there must be a distinction between the correct and incorrect use of that sign. The other side eschews the appeal to rules. This line of thought goes back to Quine, and has been vigorously defended by Davidson, who argues that linguistic rules are no more essential to speaking a language than the rules of etiquette at a dinner table are to consuming food. ;The dissertation proposes that we approach the question by asking whether there is a notion of linguistic incorrectness which is essential to meaning. Various common versions of the notion of linguistic incorrectness are considered, including the one appealed to by Saul Kripke in his discussion of Wittgenstein, the suggestion that going against the communicative conventions is making a linguistic error, and Tyler Burge's idea that we err when we violate certain constitutive community norms. Neither of these suggestions, it is argued, supports the idea that rules are essential to meaning. ;But we should not conclude from this, as does Davidson, that we can reject the notion of linguistic incorrectness altogether. If a speaker is to be interpretable there must be certain constraints on her linguistic use, and a plausible construal of these constraints, it is argued, presupposes a notion of linguistic incorrectness. The conclusion is that there is a notion of linguistic incorrectness which is essential to meaning, although this notion is not to be understood along the ordinary lines

Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put forth for and against them.

At the center of Gauker's book stands two inter-connected theses: First, that concepts are dependent on language; second, that this requires rejecting the traditional idea that linguistic communication involves a transmission of thoughts. I argue that we cannot afford to reject the traditional conception of communication and that Gauker's alternative ‘cooperative' conception is unsatisfactory. However, I also argue that Gauker is wrong to suggest that the language dependency thesis of concepts is incompatible with the traditional view of communication