Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Burge

Tyler Burge is an American philosopher whose work examines how thought and perception depend on relations beyond the individual. His anti-individualism holds that some mental contents are constitutively shaped by social practices or environmental relations. It does not merely observe that the world causes mental states: it claims that what a state represents can depend on more than an individual’s intrinsic physical and psychological condition.

Major Works

  • “Individualism and the Mental” (1979) — social conditions on thought, developed through the arthritis case.
  • “Individualism and Self-Knowledge” (1988) — compatibility between anti-individualism and first-person knowledge.
  • “Perceptual Entitlement” (2003) — warrant for perceptual belief without a prior argument establishing reliability.
  • Origins of Objectivity (2010) — perceptual representation, constancies, and the origins of objective reference.

The Arthritis Thought Experiment

Burge imagines a person who uses “arthritis” in largely ordinary ways but incorrectly believes that arthritis can occur in the thigh. The person is willing to accept correction by medical experts. In the actual linguistic community, arthritis concerns joints, so the expressed belief about arthritis in the thigh is false.

Now consider a counterfactual community that uses the same word for a wider range of rheumatoid ailments, including ones outside the joints. Hold fixed the subject’s relevant internal history and dispositions while varying the surrounding linguistic practice. Burge argues that the subject’s thought then has a different content: it concerns the wider condition, rather than arthritis as understood in the original community.

The example depends on incomplete understanding, not complete ignorance. People can possess a concept and have beliefs involving it without mastering every application. Social correction and deference help explain why the actual subject’s error is a false belief about arthritis, rather than a private redefinition that makes the statement automatically correct.

What Anti-Individualism Claims

The same intrinsic individual condition can occur with different contents in different social or environmental settings. This is a claim about individuation—what makes a thought the thought it is. It should not be paraphrased as an instantaneous change in brain activity whenever a community changes a word.

Nor does it mean that every person must defer to experts about every concept. The force of the example depends on the subject’s participation in a practice and the particular counterfactual conditions. Anti-individualism has social and perceptual forms; social membership is not a necessary condition for every kind of representation.

Critics propose a narrow content shared by internally identical subjects or argue that the arthritis case concerns linguistic interpretation rather than thought itself. Burge replies that ordinary psychological explanations attribute contents involving shared concepts and that restricting content to what is fixed internally omits part of the phenomenon. Whether a narrower description can serve some scientific purposes is a further issue, not automatically a refutation of wide content.

Perceptual Representation and Objectivity

In Origins of Objectivity, Burge investigates how perception represents objective features of the environment. Perceptual constancies are central: a system can represent a stable shape, size, or color despite changes in proximal stimulation due to distance, viewpoint, or illumination. The resulting state is not merely a record of what is currently happening at a receptor.

Such representation has veridicality conditions and can be accurate or inaccurate. Its individuation depends partly on the perceptual system’s relations to environmental kinds and on its history. Mere causal sensitivity is not automatically perception; a detector reacting to a signal does not necessarily exercise the representational capacities Burge analyzes.

Objective perception does not require the perceiver to possess philosophical concepts of mind-independent objects or to reason about its own reliability. Nonhuman animals can possess perceptual representation without those reflective abilities. Burge opposes theories that impose sophisticated conceptual prerequisites on basic perception.

Self-Knowledge and Perceptual Entitlement

Anti-individualism appears to create a puzzle about self-knowledge. If content depends on surroundings, must a person investigate those surroundings before knowing what they think? Burge argues that immediate knowledge of one’s present thought can remain authoritative even when one lacks complete knowledge of the conditions that individuate it. Knowing that one thinks something and independently identifying its entire constitutive background are different achievements.

His account of perceptual entitlement similarly distinguishes warrant from a subject’s ability to provide a reflective justification. A perceiver can have warranted beliefs based on a reliably functioning perceptual system without first proving the system’s reliability. The entitlement is defeasible: contrary evidence can undermine it. It is not a guarantee that every perception or belief is accurate.

Development and Criticism

Burge’s work extends from social conditions on conceptual thought to biological and psychological conditions on perceptual objectivity. The later project does not retract the earlier externalism; it broadens the kinds of environmental dependence under investigation.

Debates concern the role of history, the individuation of content in unusual environments, and the compatibility of wide content with causal explanation. Philosophers also ask whether self-knowledge combined with externalism permits unexpectedly easy knowledge of the external world. The theories require distinctions among possessing a concept, applying it correctly, knowing one’s thought, and knowing the environment. Anti-individualism by itself is not a complete theory of phenomenal consciousness or artificial understanding.

  • Semantic Externalism — social and environmental individuation.
  • Intentionality — representing something as being a certain way.
  • Reference — thought directed toward environmental objects and kinds.
  • Embodiment — perceptual systems and their environmental activity.
  • Block — debates over content and phenomenal character.

Further Reading

  • Burge, Tyler. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 73–121.
  • Burge, Tyler. “Individualism and Self-Knowledge.” The Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 649–663.
  • Burge, Tyler. “Perceptual Entitlement.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003): 503–548.
  • Burge, Tyler. Origins of Objectivity. Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • Mind, Matter, and Meaning — Gordon Swobe’s book-length argument about mind, consciousness, and meaning; an author position, not an endorsement by this reference page or its subjects.