Externalism and Knowledge of Comparative Content
Concepts are the constituents of thoughts, which in turn, are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are also what the predicates of our language express. According to a tradition going back to Plato, questions about comparative content – questions of the form Is concept F the same as concept...
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2002
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| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/6 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/1005/viewcontent/ExternalismKnowledgeComparativeContent_2002_wp.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Concepts are the constituents of thoughts, which in turn, are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are also what the predicates of our language express. According to a tradition going back to Plato, questions about comparative content – questions of the form Is concept F the same as concept G? – are purely about relations of ideas, and so are answerable a priori. This does not mean that no experience at all is necessary to answer such questions, for experience may be needed to grasp their content. Call a piece of information about Fs extraneous if it is not required to obtain a proper understanding of the concept F. Then what the traditional assumption says is that no extraneous information is necessary to answer a question about comparative content. Henceforth, I shall refer to this assumption about concepts as the transparency thesis, or T for short. |
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