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Article
Externalism and Knowledge of Comparative Content
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
  • Yoo Guan TAN, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2002
Abstract

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts, which in turn, are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are also what the predicates of our language express. According to a tradition going back to Plato, questions about comparative content – questions of the form Is concept F the same as concept G? – are purely about relations of ideas, and so are answerable a priori. This does not mean that no experience at all is necessary to answer such questions, for experience may be needed to grasp their content. Call a piece of information about Fs extraneous if it is not required to obtain a proper understanding of the concept F. Then what the traditional assumption says is that no extraneous information is necessary to answer a question about comparative content. Henceforth, I shall refer to this assumption about concepts as the transparency thesis, or T for short.

Discipline
Publisher
SMU Social Sciences and Humanities Working Paper Series, 5-2002
City or Country
Singapore
Copyright Owner and License
Author
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Citation Information
Yoo Guan TAN. "Externalism and Knowledge of Comparative Content" Vol. 05-2002 (2002) p. 1 - 22
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/john_williams/63/