Anti-externalism

Internalism about the mind is the view that your thoughts and sensations are constituted by conditions inside your skin. Externalism denies this, and over the past thirty years has become the dominant view in philosophy of mind. Joseph Mendola argues that the externalist theories are false and develops a viable internalist alternative.

It argues that such accounts are false or do not provide proper motivation for externalism, and develops an internalist but physicalist account of sensory content involving intentional qualia. Part III critically examines theoretical motivations for externalism entwined with externalist accounts of language, including work of Brandom, Davidson, and Wittgenstein. It dialectically develops an internalist account of thoughts mediated by language that can bridge the internally constituted qualia of Part II and the rigidified description clusters of Part I.

1. Introduction
PART I: ON SOME MISLEADING CASES
2. Externalist Cases and Internalist Theory
3. Internalist Cases and Externalist Theory
4. The Real Moral
PART II: MIND-BASED EXTERNALISM AND SENSORY CONTENT
5. Against Etiological Semantics
6. Non-Etiological Mind-Based Externalism
7. Qualia and Sensory Content
PART III: LANGUAGE-BASED EXTERNALISM AND THOUGHT CONTENT
8. Private Language and Privileged Access
9. Language, Truth, and Inference
10. Qualia Empiricism
Bibliography