Social Externalism and its Ramifications

Social externalism is a thesis about the individuation-conditions of thoughts. Actually, the thesis applies only to a special category of ‘trained’ thoughts, thoughts which issue from trained thinking. It isn't that the thinker of such a thought has to have had special training about the subject-matter. It is rather that he or she needs to have acquired certain basic linguistic skills and values. For trained thoughts are thoughts whose contents are tailored to the demands of communication. Social externalism, as I understand it, says that people who are competent in a public language are equipped to have certain thoughts whose contents are fixed (in part) by the lexical semantic norms of their language.

This restriction to trained thoughts has far-reaching consequences. It makes the thesis more modest and more compelling. Not all of a language-user's mental states have their contents fixed in this way, and the mental states of a non-language-user cannot be so fixed. There must be various primitive kinds of thinking which subserve and predate trained thinking. If prelinguistic children were not naturally endowed with the intelligence to construct cognitive maps of their surroundings, to imagine possibilities, to choose between alternatives, and so on, they would be incapable of learning any language and consequently would be unable to acquire the capacity for trained thinking.