Anti-individualism

Anti-individualism also so-called as content externalism is an approach to linguistic meaning in philosophy, the philosophy of psychology, and linguistics.

The proponents arguing for anti-individualism in these areas pretend in common the conviction that what seems to be internal to the individual is to some degree dependent on the social environment, thus self-knowledge, intentions, reasoning & moral value may variously be seen as being determined by factors external the person. The position has been supported by Sanford Goldberg and by other thinkers such(a) as Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge.

Overview

Academic discussion negotiating anti-individualism as a reasonable stance started with Tyler Burge's 1988 Individualism and Self-Knowledge being especially influential. In it, Burge nature out to argue for a limited agreement with the Cartesian framework of self-cognition as being Authoritative, but also identified out that cognition of self-cognition was not always absolute, allowing for the individuation of thought to originate from both the external content of our environment as living as from the internal landscape of our self-knowledge as it is for still being discovered: "One can know what one's mental events are and yet not know relevant general facts approximately the conditions for individuating those events. this is the simply not true that the cogito helps us cognition of the individuation conditions of our thoughts which enable us to "shut off" their individuation conditions from the physical environment".

Michael McKinsey builds on this in 1991 examine Burge's image in his paper Anti-Individualism and Privileged Access arguing that there is no warrant to an epistemic narrow state of mind i.e. privileged access and that there is only a wide state of mind as influenced by the conditions of individuation of thought. Anthony Brueckner then questions McKinsey's create on Burge and McKinsey replies in his Accepting the Consequences of Anti-individualism.

Many of the essays found in Hilary Putnam's The Twin Earth Chronicles are considered early formative workings for the anti-individualist framework of meaning.