Tyler Burge
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Tyler Burge (born 1946, Ph.D., Princeton University, 1971) is a Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He has made contributions to several areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he has published articles on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. A collection of his writings on Frege, along with a substantial introduction and several postscripts by the author, has been published (Burge, 2005). In epistemology, he has written on such topics as self-knowledge and the warrant to testimony. He is perhaps most well-known for his contributions to the philosophy of mind, including his views on de re belief and, most notably, anti-individualism with respect to mental content, which is also known as externalism. A festschrift devoted mostly to Burge's work on anti-individualism, including extensive replies from Burge to the contributors, has also appeared (Hahn and Ramberg 2003).
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[edit] Anti-Individualism
Burge arguably has been philosophy's foremost expositor and defender of anti-individualism. In Burge’s words, anti-individualism is a theory that asserts the following: “individuating many of a person or animal’s mental kinds … is necessarily dependent on relations that the person bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment" (Burge 1988, 650). This view, and some variants, has been called "content externalism", or just "externalism." Burge favors "anti-individualism" over this terminology, in part because he considers the central issue to be what individuates content, rather than where contents may be located, as "externalism" may suggest. (Burge 2003, 435-6)
In “Individualism and the Mental” (1979), Burge argued that a language speaker’s thought contents are dependent on the conventional meanings of the words in her community. The argumentative methodology employed by Burge proceeds by intuitive reflection on hypothetical cases, inspired by the Twin Earth thought experiment of Hilary Putnam. Burge asks us to consider a patient who goes to see his doctor, and tells his doctor that he has arthritis in the thigh. According to Burge’s intuitions, the patient believes that he has arthritis in the thigh (a belief that is false, since one cannot have arthritis in the thigh, by definition). Next we are asked to consider the same patient in a world in which the only difference is the conventional meaning of the word “arthritis.” Here, “arthritis” designates arthritis and other rheumatoid ailments, including the patient’s thigh ailment. Burge’s intuitions are that the patient in this scenario does not believe that he has arthritis in the thigh. If we are to report the patient’s belief, we would need to coin a word that reflects this usage of “arthritis” and say that he believes he has tharthritis (say) in his thigh. The beliefs the patient has in the two cases are different, on Burge’s intuitions. But since the only difference between the two cases is the conventional meaning of the word “arthritis”, Burge concludes that the patient’s thought contents depend on the conventional meanings as determined by the linguistic community.
Burge argues in a similar fashion that a person’s beliefs are dependent on the physical world. In “The Meaning of Meaning” (1975), Putnam had argued that the meaning of a natural kind term such as “water” depends on the nature of the physical world. Putnam asked us to imagine a hypothetical world – Twin Earth – that is exactly like Earth, except that the liquid that looks and acts like H2O is not H2O, but a chemically different substance, which is simply abbreviated as XYZ. Putnam holds that the word “water” on Twin Earth does not refer to H2O, but rather to XYZ. Burge (1982) agrees with Putnam that the reference of the word is different, but holds also that the thoughts of persons on Twin Earth differ from those of persons on Earth: while persons on Earth have thoughts about H2O, persons on Twin Earth have thoughts about XYZ. The difference in the thoughts is attributable to the difference between the nature of stuffs in the respective physical environments. As with the “arthritis” thought experiment, dependence of thought on the physical environment is a conclusion that is supposed to follow purely from reflection on the cases in the thought experiment.
Burge has extended the thesis of anti-individualism into the realm of the theory of vision, arguing that the contents of representations posited by a computational theory of vision, such as that pioneered by David Marr, are dependent on the environment of the organism's evolutionary history. (See Burge 1986.)
Anti-individualism about thoughts is a controversial thesis. It has been disputed on a number of grounds. For example, it has been claimed that the thesis undermines a person’s authoritative knowledge of their own thought contents. (See, e.g., McKinsey 1991.) It has also been thought to cause problems for our understanding of the way that mental states cause behavior. (See, e.g., Fodor 1991.) Burge (1988) has argued that anti-individualism is compatible with knowledge of our own mental states. He has also argued that it presents no problems for our understanding of causation. (See Burge 1989.)
[edit] Bibliography
- Burge, Tyler. 1979. Individualism and the Mental. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4: 73-121.
- Burge, Tyler. 1982. Other Bodies. In Woodfield, Andrew, ed., Thought and Object. New York: Oxford.
- Burge, Tyler. 1986. Individualism and Psychology. Philosophical Review 45: 3-45.
- Burge, Tyler. 1988. Individualism and Self-Knowledge. The Journal of Philosophy 85: 64-663.
- Burge, Tyler. 1989. Individuation and Causation in Psychology. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70: 303-322.
- Burge, Tyler. 2003. Reply to Loar. In Hahn and Ramberg.
- Burge, Tyler. 2005. Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Fodor, Jerry. 1987. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Hahn, Martin and Bjørn Ramberg, eds. 2003. Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- McKinsey, Michael. 1991. Anti-Individaulism and Privileged Access. Analysis 51: 9-16.
- Putnam, Hilary. 1975. The Meaning of Meaning. In Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[edit] Books
- Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge, eds. Martin Hahn and Bjørn Ramberg, MIT Press, 2003, ISBN 0-262-58222-8.
- Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege, Oxford University Press 2005, ISBN 0-19-927853-9.
- Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind: Essays on Tyler Burge, eds. Maria J. Frapolli and Esther Romero, CSLI Publications, ISBN 1-57586-346-4.
