DESCARTES REDUX

Recent work in epistemology and the philosophy of mind suggests that we may at last be putting our Cartesian heritage behind us. The notion that knowledge demands certainty, and that empirical knowledge, in particular, requires an agent-centred core of indubitable propositions, is out of fashion. Dualism is nowadays rarely espoused, and the Cartesian picture of minds as spectators monitoring an inner world that mirrors an outer world is under revision. Earlier, in Chapter 2, we surveyed arguments purporting to show that the contents of thoughts are fixed in part by historical or contextual features of thinkers, that what an agent thinks is determined, at least in part, by that agent's circumstances and causal history. A conception of this sort turns Cartesian internalism inside out. To possess a mind is not to occupy the place of a detached onlooker, but to be engaged in the world.

Although I am prepared to take externalism seriously, I have not officially endorsed any particular externalist programme. I have suggested only that, in general, externalist accounts of the mind promise to solve the problem of intentionality in a way that meshes with our impression of the world as layered, its characteristics hierarchically arranged. In particular, these accounts fit with the notion that agents possess mental characteristics in virtue of their possession of certain physical characteristics.