Cathal O'Madagain

It appears to be the case that some of our concepts have their content fixed by the minds of others. For example, we might have thoughts involving the concept quark, without knowing quite what quarks are. In such a case, we are likely to accept the authority of a physicist to tell us what exactly we are thinking about. This phenomenon, known as ‘social externalism’ about concepts, is puzzling both in terms of _how_ such concepts are supposed to work, but also in terms of _why_ we should have concepts whose content is fixed by the minds of others. In this chapter it is argued that if we think about social externalism in terms of extended mind reasoning we find a better account of how deferential concepts work, and why we have them, than has hitherto been available.

To avoid difficulties that arise when we appeal to speaker intentions or multiple rules to determine the meaning of indexicals, Cohen (2013) recently defends a conventionalist account of these terms that focuses on their context of tokening. Apart from some tricky cases already discussed in the literature, however, such an account faces a serious difficulty: in many speech acts, multiple apparent tokens are produced – for example when a speaker speaks on a telephone, and her utterance is heard both where she speaks, and at the location of the receiver of the call. The ‘token-contextual’ account seems to imply that in such cases a speaker will simultaneously produce multiple contradictory utterances. Here I argue that to resolve such problems we cannot help but to invoke speaker intentions. However, by appealing to intentions at the level of the metaphysics of semantic tokens, rather than to decide their meaning, the token-contextualist can make this appeal without reintroducing the difficulties associated with intentionalist accounts that she hopes to avoid. The resulting metaphysics of semantic tokens is, interestingly, more complex than we might have expected.