Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Burge

Tyler Burge (b. 1946) has been at UCLA for most of his career, working with a precision and patience that often makes the difficulty of the problems invisible until you try to solve them yourself. His 1979 paper “Individualism and the Mental” set up a thought experiment that the field is still unpacking: imagine a person who holds a slightly mistaken belief about the meaning of “arthritis.” Hold that person’s physical and internal states fixed, but change the linguistic community around them so that “arthritis” means something else there. Their belief changes content — which means mental content is not fixed by what is inside the individual. Anti-individualism. The implications are still working themselves out.

Major Works

  • “Individualism and the Mental” (1979) — the arthritis thought experiment; the founding paper of social externalism
  • “Other Bodies” (1982) — environmental externalism extended to thought about the external world
  • Origins of Objectivity (2010) — a monumental account of how perceptual representation constitutes objective knowledge of the world
  • “Perceptual Entitlement” (2003) — the epistemic ground of perceptual justification
  • “Individualism and Self-Knowledge” (1988) — how anti-individualism and privileged self-knowledge can be reconciled

Key Positions

Anti-individualism (social externalism). Burge’s arthritis case: a subject holds the belief “I have arthritis in my thigh.” In fact, the subject only has arthritis in their joints; the belief is false. Now run the counterfactual: the same subject, unchanged inside, in a community where “arthritis” covers thigh inflammations as well. There the belief’s content differs; it is a different belief. The content of mental states depends constitutively on the linguistic and social community in which the subject is embedded. Hold the individual fixed; change the community; change the mind. This extends Putnam’s externalism about natural-kind terms into the territory of ordinary concepts, showing that the phenomenon is not restricted to scientific vocabulary.

Perceptual anti-individualism. Burge extends anti-individualism from conceptual content to perceptual content. The veridicality conditions of perceptual states depend not just on internal functional organization but on the causal-environmental history of the perceptual system — on how systems of its kind have typically interacted with the world, not merely on the proximal stimulus or the internal state.

Origins of Objectivity. Burge’s most ambitious work: a systematic account of how perceptual representation constitutes objectivity — the ability to represent the world as it is independently of any particular perspective. Perceptual states have representational contents with veridicality conditions; these contents are constitutively anti-individualistic, shaped by the causal-environmental history of the system. Perception, Burge argues there, is the ground of our capacity for objective representation, preceding and grounding conceptual thought.

Individuation of mental states. Mental states cannot be individuated by their intrinsic features alone. Two individuals who are physically and functionally identical but embedded in different environments can have mental states with different contents. Wide content (content individuated by the environment) is ineliminable. This conclusion has significance for cognitive science, which often assumes narrow, intrinsically individuated content.

My View

Burge is a crucial ally, and Origins of Objectivity stands behind more of this book than the citations show. His account of perception as fundamentally world-directed, objectively individuated, and anti-individualistically constituted converges with the book’s core claim that experience presents the world, not inner surrogates.

The social externalism is exactly right, and the book inherits it: content is not in the head; mental states are individuated by their relations to the world and the community. This is part of what makes the book’s qualified reference theory of meaning possible — reference is an achievement that depends on social and environmental relations, not on matching inner representations to outer facts.

The departures: Burge tends to treat phenomenal consciousness at arm’s length — he is careful about the veridicality conditions of perceptual states, but less engaged with what it is like to be in those states. The book carries anti-individualism into the identity claim without identifying phenomenal character with bare world-directed content. Within a state already counted as conscious and borne by an identified subject, phenomenal character consists in the complete world-presenting intentional profile: externally fixed content under a perceptual or bodily-affective mode, with its determinacy, field structure, and attentional organization.

One further step concerns what follows from objective content. Burge’s evolutionary and perceptual history helps explain how states acquire veridicality conditions. The book then asks separately whether such content constitutes phenomenal character and which integrated organization perceives or understands by means of it. Practical stake may add autonomy, vulnerability, and welfare, but it neither fixes the content nor creates objectivity. See Semantic Externalism and Putnam.

  • Semantic Externalism — Burge’s anti-individualism and its connection to Putnam’s externalism
  • Intentionality — the world-directed character of content that anti-individualism establishes
  • Reference — the book’s reference theory, which anti-individualism underwrites
  • Embodiment — one realization route for perceptual mode, environmental coupling, autonomy, and welfare, separate from Burge’s content-fixing work