Lexicon of Arguments

 

Frank I 691
Thoughts/Individuation/Burge: how are our thoughts individuated?
Thesis: many thoughts are externally individuated: they are necessarily dependent on relationships in which the person is to the physical or, in some cases, the social environment.
Cf. >Objects of belief, >Objects of thought.
My thought experiments pursue the joint strategy of keeping the history of physical movement, surface stimulation and internal chemical processes constant.
I want to show that some thoughts of the person vary.
Thesis: the kind of thoughts you can have depends on the relationships in which you are.
Question: How can we know of some of our mental events directly, non-empirically
Frank I 692
when their identity depends on the environment?
A person does not need to explore their environment to know what their thoughts are.
(s) The formulation is always "what thoughts", "what kind of thoughts" that avoids the reference to truth conditions, but the content should be known.)
Frank I 700
Thoughts/Individuation/Burge: we individuate our thoughts by thinking them and not the others in self-attributing ways. This knowledge is simply not discursive but immediate.
>Thoughts.

Tyler Burge (1988a): Individualism and Self-Knowledge, in: The Journal of
Philosophy 85 (1988), 649-663