Burge* uses a thought experiment to demonstrate his theory of social externalism, whereby the content of a person’s thoughts is dependent on the meaning given to words by the conventions of her community. In Burge’s version, a person complains to his doctor that he has arthritis in his thigh. This is false because arthritis is, by definition, a disease of joints. Then, we are to consider Twearth (a counter-factual scenario) at which the conventional meaning of ‘arthritis’ includes earthly arthritis and other rheumatoid ailments, but the patient is otherwise qualitatively identical to his Earthly counterpart. Burge thinks that the Twin Earth patient could then be correct in his complaint of arthritis, and takes this to show that the conventional meaning of ‘arthritis’ determines the content of the patient’s belief.
Yet there are other ways to interpret these two scenarios. First, it could be the case that the Earthly patient has a different concept of arthritis to that possessed by the experts. Thus, both the Earth patient and the Twearthly patient have the same mental content, invariable in every context, and they are both right about their condition. The problem arises when the Earth doctor charitably assumes that her patient expresses the same concept that she does when he says ‘arthritis’. Second, it could be the case that the Earthly patient does have the same concept ARTHRITIS as the Earth doctor, and he is incorrect in his application of it. Further, the Twearthly patient still has the same concept as the Earth patient and they are both wrong about their condition. Third, the Earthly and Twearthly patients could share a concept that is not the same as ARTHRITIS possessed by the experts in either world, and probably both be wrong about their condition.
One way in which Burge deals with these alternative interpretations is to point out that the patient is readily corrected by his doctor when told that he cannot have arthritis in his thigh. When the verdict goes against the patient, he does not plead that the doctor has misinterpreted the concept he refers to linguisitically by ‘arthritis’, but accepts that he is in error. This is taken to show that the patient’s concept ARTHRITIS is the same as that of his doctor, not only in the Earthly scenario but in both scenarios, so that Burges argument for the variability of one’s mental content depending on one’s social environment goes through. What this point fails to give sufficient weight to is that the patient believes both that he and the doctor share the same concept associated with the term ‘arthritis’, and that the doctor knows more than he does concerning the concept. Thus, in any of the alternative interpretations offered above, there may be one earth on which the patient has the same concept as the doctor and simply has an incorrect belief concerning a particular application of that concept. Yet, in all of the alternative interpretations, there is at least one scenario is which the patient has a different concept to the doctor, the application of that concept to the thigh concept may have been correct, the patient accepts the doctor’s advice and the patient comes to hold a false belief concerning the distinct concept he refers to by ‘arthritis’. Perhaps it seems implausible that one could have a concept of arthritis – or any other concept, for that matter – that is detectably dissimilar to that used by the experts and knowledgeable folk in one’s community, and that one could have beliefs that are incorrect of one’s own concept though correct of the concept used by one’s community. To meet this charge of implausibility, we may suppose that, in the actual world of Earthlings, the patient and the doctor would share the same concept, ceteris paribus. It is only on Twearth that the patient and the doctor refer to distinct concepts by the term ‘arthritis’, and the patient takes on board the false belief concerning his own concept that is true of the doctor’s concept. If this is the case then the implausibility just mentioned is the implausibility of the Twearthly, counterfactual scenario, in which the patient spent his life exposed to all of the same social environments and yet developed a distinct concept he referred to by ‘arthritis’ as compared to that used by his community, with all of the same inferential liaisons intact. Yet, it always remains a possible explanation that an individual’s concepts differ radically from those possessed by others in their community, even though this implies widespead error throughout their web of beliefs in inferential liaisons. What this serves to highlight is that we may not have a very high level of epistemological access to analyses of our mental content, at all. Upon accepting this view, it becomes a matter of interpretation as to whether one accepts an internalist or an externalist view of mental content, and it would have to be granted that the former has a greater prima facie claim on folk intuitions prior to one’s exposure to Twin Earth thought experiments.
*Burge, T., ‘Individualism and the Mental’ (1979) 4 Midwest Studies in Philosophy pp. 73-121
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