Externalism and self-knowledge: A puzzle in two dimensions Jordi Fernández Macquarie University E-mail: jfernandez@scmp.mq.edu.au 1. The puzzle My purpose in this essay is to suggest a way of dissolving the puzzle of externalism and self- knowledge. For the sake of simplicity, I will only be concerned with externalism about and privileged access to the content of our beliefs. The puzzle is essentially the following. Suppose that externalism is correct. That is, suppose that believing something is a matter of being related to certain objects or substances in one’s environment, as opposed to having a certain intrinsic property. (I will be abbreviating this by saying that the content of one’s beliefs ‘depends on’ factors that are part of one’s environment.) This is the view motivated by Hilary Putnam’s well- known Twin-Earth tale. 1 Also, notice that we all seem to have beliefs about what we believe that enjoy a special kind of justification. 2 It is special in that it is different from the kind of justification that anybody else’s beliefs about our own beliefs may have in two respects: We do not need to rely on reasoning in order to be entitled to belizefs about our own beliefs, and we do not have to rely on empirical evidence either. Now, how is that possible given externalism? How can we have privileged access to the content of our own beliefs if it really depends on the environment we are in? After all, whether we are in, say, Earth or Twin-Earth, is not something we can determine without substantial empirical investigation and reasoning. This is the puzzle of externalism and self-knowledge. This puzzle has been raised in support of the view that externalism makes privileged access impossible, which I shall refer to as ‘incompatibilism’. 3 Let us formulate the two views that the incompatibilist takes to be in conflict as follows: PA We have privileged access to the content of our own beliefs. EXT The content of our beliefs depends on factors that are part of our environment. The moral that the incompatibilist draws from the puzzle above is, then, the following: INC If the content of our beliefs depends on factors that are part of our environment, then we have no privileged access to the content of our own beliefs. The dilemma that INC is meant to generate is that both EXT and PA seem to be grounded on strong intuitions about the metaphysics and epistemology of mind. Yet, it is obvious that if INC is correct, then either PA or EXT should be dropped. The position I shall defend here is that, properly understood, externalism and privileged access are compatible. Why ‘properly understood’? Because there are readings of PA and EXT that make INC true, but I shall argue that none of them is such that PA and EXT are plausible under that reading. More specifically, my diagnosis of the puzzle is that a confusion of two distinct notions of mental content makes PA and EXT appear independently compelling and yet jointly implausible. My main goal in this essay is to reveal that confusion by using a distinction that is present in the literature on a certain semantics framework, namely, two-dimensional semantics. 1