Anti-Externalism - Joseph Mendola

Joseph Mendola, following in the tradition of John Locke, is trying to account for our capacity to have thoughts about the world around us in terms of our having internally constituted ideas whose existence is independent of that world. He describes the approach as ‘qualia empiricism’. The central internalist claim of the book is that ‘all the conditions that constitute [people's] thoughts and sensations are internal to their skin and contemporaneous, inside and now’ (p. 1). Mendola's response to the ‘twin world’ externalist arguments of Putnam et al. is the standard one of distinguishing broad from narrow content. While aspects of meaning may indeed be external, these are not psychologically relevant, and so do not figure in introspectably transparent narrow mental content. In the first instance there are qualia. These are supposed to be individuated in line with the structure of a subject's discriminatory judgements about how things seem. So if I cannot distinguish reddish purple from bluish purple even though there is a different physical structure causing each of these experiences, then these colours seem the same to me, and the qualia are the same

Consciousness · Empiricism · Epistemology · Externalism · Internalism and externalism · Introspection · Meaning (existential) · Metaphysics · Philosophy of mind · Physicalism · Qualia · Subject (documents) · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science