> On Aug 4, 2016, at 12:26 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > Now I have started looking up about externalism- David Chalmers and so on- > very complicated. But I will tend towards externalism too, I think. If a mind > is not extended into the environment, it cannot develop, I guess, like Kaspar > Hausers mind couldnt. And somewhere I have read the theory, that artificial > intelligence will not be possible just with computers, only with robots it > might. > Is it so, that what the internalists call mind, the externalists call > consciousness?
A good book on externalism is Rowland’s Externalism: Putting Mind and World Back Together Again <https://www.amazon.com/Externalism-Putting-World-Together-Again/dp/0773526501>. Consciousness and mind are terms used so differently by so many different philosophers and traditions I don’t think you could really say much there. The internalist/externalist distinction is helpful to cut across the terminology. The distinction pops up among many very, very different philosophical traditions. Further even within externalism there are different kinds. So Putnam (highly influenced by Peirce) is famous for his semantic externalism. But that applies more to terms like water and noting the distinction between reference and phenomenological content. Often externalism is content externalism which is to ask whether the content of mental states is purely within either the brain or at least conscious awareness. Typically the way the analysis goes is that externalism is with respect to some property P and whether a person having property P depends just on the person or things external to the person. So to follow Putnam again if I desire a drink of water, does that mental state depend just upon things inside my brain or does it depend upon whether I’m on a world where water is H2O out in the world in which I engage. The SEP has a nice article on some of this. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/ <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/> I’d just add that externalism can have slighlty different senses depending upon the type of anlaysis. The main ones though are mental content externalism and semantic externalism. What’s interesting is that it’s actually one of the places where analytic philosophy can be fruitful when the linguistic analysis then is applied to various philosophers. It’s a good way of illuminating some issues in particular philosophers. So for instance in the Continental tradition Heidegger and Sartre would be externalists whereas Husserl, in at least major periods of his thought, is an internalist more like Descartes. This in turn leads to greater clarity in trying to analyze their projects. Often the key figures themselves aren’t the best sources for what they are arguing for or against due to certain clarity issues as well as the form their arguments take.
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
