Yaron Senderowicz
senderow@post.tau.ac.il

The controversy between externalists and internalists is an ongoing controversy. It received a significant amount of interest among philosophers and cognitive scientists in the last three decades. An externalist’s notion of content appeared first in the writings of Putnam . It was systematized by Burge and others, and became an alternative program to internalism. The present paper focuses on the controversy between externalists and internalists with regard to self-knowledge of content.

The investigation of the role of self-knowledge and privileged access claims to knowledge was traditionally conceived as a necessary part of a theory of subjectivity. In the 20th century, behaviorists such as Ryle endeavored to undermine the adequacy of privileged access claims to knowledge as part of their more general attack on the Cartesian concept of mind. In spite of their hostility to Cartesianism, Burge and other externalists think that one can and must account for self-knowledge within the bounds of an externalist’s theory of content. They contend that (a) self-knowledge of content is an undisputed fact and (b) self-knowledge of content is compatible with an externalist theory of content. As against this, Boghossian, Bruekner, Butler and others argued that (the fact of) self-knowledge of content is incompatible with externalism. Burge’s paper "Individualism and self knowledge" (1988) contains an externalist’s account of self- knowledge of content that anticipates this attack. Warfield and Flavey & Owens responded to the arguments presented by Boghossian and Brueckner.

My main intention is to contribute to the investigation of the epistemic relevance of controversies. By the term "controversy" I refer to a specific type of a polemical exchange in accordance with the meaning ascribed to this term by Dascal in several papers. First I show why the above exchange is a controversy in Dascal’s terms. Then I show how the actual dialogical exchange contributes to the (internal) development of each of the positions involved. I show that new distinctions and concepts that are introduced by the contenders are initiated by arguments presented by the other party. So for example, the distinction between the concepts ‘knowledge of content’ (KC) and ‘comparative knowledge of content’ (CKC) is introduced by the externalists as a response to the "slow switching cases" thought experiments. Other similar examples will be analyzed. These examples provide a good illustration of the manner in which controversies contribute to the growth of philosophical knowledge.