ABSTRACT
Individualism with respect to the individuation and ontology of mental states and processes remains a dominant feature of current theories of mind. Minimally, individualism is the doctrine of supervenience, according to which “an individual’s intentional states and events (type and token) could not be different from what they are, given the individual’s physical, chemical, neural, and functional histories” (Burge 1986b: p. 4). But many think that a stronger form of individualism is required: “An individual’s being in any given intentional state (or being the subject of such an event) can be explicated by reference to states and events of the individual that are specifiable without using intentional vocabulary and without presupposing anything about the individual’s social or physical environment” (Burge 1986b: p. 4). Both are part of the larger naturalist project for locating the human mind in the causal nexus, but the stronger form has implications for how to understand the content of our thoughts and beliefs. Mental content must be internal to the individual, must be in the head of the individual. Tyler Burge, for one, has argued strenuously against an individualist conception of mental states. In this essay, I shall support Burge’s conclusions. The distinctive approach he uses, however, is limited in showing why internalism and individualism are mistaken. So, though I shall use the thought-experiment approach as a way into the problem of individuating mental content, my target is to show why individualism goes wrong.
