Content Externalism and Phenomenal Character: A New Worry about Privileged Access

Abstract

Jonathan Ellis

A central question in contemporary epistemology concerns whether content externalism threatens a common doctrine about privileged access.  If the contents of a subject’s thoughts are in part determined by environmental factors, it is argued, then the subject could not know the contents of these thoughts independently of empirical investigation.  A related doctrine holds that a subject’s access to the phenomenal character of her experience is independent of empirical investigation.  It is typically assumed that content externalism does not threaten this latter doctrine.

I argue that, if content externalism is in tension with privileged access to content, it is also in tension with privileged access to phenomenal character.  This is not because content externalism implies externalism about phenomenal character; my argument here is compatible with internalism about phenomenal character.  Rather, my argument turns on the idea that content externalists must be externalist about phenomenal concepts, i.e., concepts we apply to the phenomenal quality of our experience (e.g., tingly). 

On a widely held conception of phenomenal concepts, they are formed through a process of demonstration, whereby the subject demonstrates a phenomenal quality of her experience.  But demonstration involves a cognitive background.  And for certain phenomenal qualities, a subject’s demonstration of it would employ concepts that are themselves explicitly in the purview of the standard externalist arguments about content (e.g., Burge 1979).  I show that, if the concepts employed are externally determined, so (in some cases) will the concepts formed be.  On the assumption that introspective access to phenomenal character involves the employment of phenomenal concepts, I argue that content externalism is thus in no less tension with privileged access to phenomenal character than it is with privileged access to content.