Externalism and a priori knowledge of empirical facts

Abstract

I want to discuss the possibility of combining a so-called ‘externalist ’ theory of empirical content, on which the contents of a person’s beliefs are determined in part by the nature of his extra-bodily environmental embedding, with a plausible account of selfknowledge, in particular, of a person’s knowledge of the contents of his own beliefs. A difficulty for this combination is thought to be that it leads to the availability of a kind non-empirical, a priori knowledge about the mind-independent physical world which is intuitively intolerable. 1 The inference which is held to create this difficulty can be put like this. (E1) I believe that p. (E2) If x believes that p, then x’s environmental embedding is thus-and-so. ∴ (E3) My environmental embedding is thus-and-so. An example of this purportedly problematic inference might be the following. (w1) (w2)

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