Anti-individualism and knowledge of content.
Item
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Title
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Anti-individualism and knowledge of content.
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Identifier
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AAI9830745
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identifier
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9830745
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Creator
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Nuccetelli, Susana Ines.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Stephen Schiffer
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Psychology, General | Language, General
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Abstract
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The object of this dissertation is to determine whether the doctrines of anti-individualism and privileged self-knowledge are compatible. The former is the thesis that some of an individual's propositional-attitude contents supervene on the individual's external relations with his physical and/or social environment. The latter includes the theses of privileged access and first-person authority, according to which self-ascriptive beliefs about one's own occurrent, conscious, mental states are directly justified and truth-warranted.;This dissertation considers how these doctrines can be the supported, and finds them equally plausible. But some problems seem to arise for the attempt to hold both doctrines simultaneously. For, on the one hand, it appears that any such attempt entails that one could know specific empirical propositions a priori. And on the other hand, given anti-individualism, one might have to investigate the environment in order to know the contents of one's own thoughts.;If the arguments raising these problems are sound, then anti-individualism and privileged self-knowledge would be incompatible. Yet, each seems initially plausible in its own right, and I do wish to hold them both. To resolve this paradox, I distinguish between two senses in which a proposition could be a priori, arguing that beliefs involving object-dependent propositions are not a priori in a strong sense. Once this is shown to be plausible, I maintain that there is no closure principle sanctioning the inference required by the incompatibilist's arguments. Finally, I consider why those arguments seemed at first plausible--thus dissolving the paradox and showing that anti-individualism and privileged self-knowledge are compatible after all.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
