Disentangled Externalisms

Abstract

In contemporary philosophy of mind, the consensus is that content externalism and vehicle externalism are logically independent. Both proponents and critics of content externalism agree that content externalism does not entail vehicle externalism, and vice versa. Sprevak and Kallestrup have recently challenged that view and argued that the conviction that content externalism and vehicle externalism are logically independent is not true for various forms of vehicle externalism. (Sprevak and Kallestrup 2014) According to them, what one can mean by vehicle externalism is vague and this is a problematic for understanding the relationship between content externalism and vehicle externalism. My aim here is to respond to their analysis of the subject by arguing that what they call “realization-vehicle externalism” is the most precisely formulated type of vehicle externalism and with an even more precise understanding of it, the independency principle (IP) is in no trouble. I will mostly use their terminology to avoid any possible misunderstandings.

In §1, I will clarify what one means by content externalism and vehicle externalism comparing both of them to internalist accounts of content and pointing out the most straightforward differences. In §2, I consider some different types of vehicle externalism examined by Sprevak and Kallestrup and include further analysis of where they differ. I will argue that the differences stem from the philosophical motivation behind these definitions. In §3, the problems with the two most promising types of vehicle externalism are discussed and I argue that the realization vehicle externalism (with some modifications) is the best type of vehicle externalism. Later in that section, I clarify these modifications and attempt to achieve a new characterization of realization vehicle externalism, which works properly with the independency principle.