Bonjour and internalist epistemologists argue that semantic reference without any grounding in the speaker's epistemic access produces a kind of semantic blindness incompatible with genuine propositional attitudes.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Propositional attitudes require content the subject understands; reference divorced from epistemic access is cognitively inaccessible to the agent.
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2.When speakers cannot discriminate what their terms refer to, they lack genuine belief about those referents, only apparent or empty thoughts.
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3.Internalism correctly identifies that mental content depends on what is internally available to conscious reflection and cognitive processing.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Externalist cases like Putnam's Twin Earth show we successfully refer to H2O versus XYZ despite identical internal mental states, refuting internalism.
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2.Children and scientists possess genuine propositional attitudes about atoms, electrons, and genes while lacking direct epistemic access to them.
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3.Semantic blindness claims conflate understanding *how to use* a term with understanding *what* it refers to—these are distinct cognitive capacities.
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Key Terms

BonJour(as a key philosopher in coherentism): Laurence BonJour is a contemporary American philosopher famous for developing and defending coherentist theories of knowledge and justification.
Epistemic access(used to show that the distinction might only be about our different ways of knowing, not about reality itself): The different ways we can know about or gain knowledge of something—essentially, how we're able to learn about it.
Internalist epistemologists(as a school of thought in epistemology): Philosophers who believe that whether you truly know something depends only on what's happening inside your own mind (your thoughts, experiences, and reasoning), not on external facts about the world.
epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry): A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
grounding(Drawn from contemporary metaphysics; proposed as potentially applicable to understanding the foundations of legality.): A metaphysical relation in which some entities or facts are more foundational than others, providing a hierarchical structure of the world.
propositional attitudes(Fodor's 1980 reply to Searle): Mental states characteristic of an organism that has a brain, such as beliefs and desires, which computational symbol manipulation alone is insufficient to produce.
semantic blindness(Epistemology; debate between epistemic contextualism and invariantism): The condition in which ordinary speakers are systematically unable to recognize the correct semantic properties of their own knowledge attributions, such that they fail to notice whether 'know' is context-sensitive or invariant
semantic reference(philosophy of language): What a word actually points to or refers to in the real world—for example, the word 'dog' semantically refers to actual dogs, not the idea of dogs.

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Philosophy of Language1 linked

Children and scientists possess genuine propositional attitudes about atoms, ele...Externalist cases like Putnam's Twin Earth show we successfully refer to H2O ver...Internalism correctly identifies that mental content depends on what is internal...Propositional attitudes require content the subject understands; reference divor...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit