Our Knowledge of the Internal World By Robert C. Stalnaker

摘要

Robert Stalnaker’s Locke Lectures of 2007 are published here under the clever andnappropriate title Our Knowledge of the Internal World. Seeking to invert the kind ofninternalist foundationalism pursued by, among others, Bertrand Russell in OurnKnowledge of the External World, Stalnaker aims for an explanation of the internal,nmental world that depends on facts about the external world itself. Stalnaker’s, however,nis not your ordinary externalism of the kind associated with thought aboutnindividuals and natural kinds. Such views, according to Stalnaker, often try to combinentheir externalism with a residual internalism about representations of, or closelynderived from, phenomenal experience. This leads to various problems for which thenanswer is not ‘retreating to an internalist picture’ but ‘a move in the opposite direction,nto a more thoroughgoing externalism’. But Stalnaker is not so radically externalistnas to deny that subjects do have their own perspectives on the world and somenspecial knowledge of what those perspectives are. The ultimate goal of this book,ntherefore, is to promote ‘an externalist perspective on a subject’s point of view’.nAlthough Stalnaker concedes that obtaining such a picture is difficult and raisesnmany problems, he does not, contrary to Thomas Nagel and others, think there isnanything paradoxical about it. Like all of Stalnaker’s work this book is never aporetic,nbut always constructive.