ABSTRACT
The previous chapter takes care on the possibilities of meanings and the processes of ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’ as a parameter of acquisition of knowledge and learning. This chapter (Self-Knowledge and Externalist Appeals) vindicates a reformed account of self-knowledge and externalism. Externalism emphasizes that the mental contents are in nature allied to the external world since it has a metaphysical entice, whereas epistemology construes rescue for thoughts and mental contents in the light of the claim that thoughts and mental contents cannot be relational in the externalist sense since the subject is the first person authority about his/her thoughts and mental contents. A gripping outline that the chapter draws is to foresee reconciliation between externalism and self-knowledge from the perspectives of Davidson, Burge and Bilgrami. Self-ascription seems an elementary notion of privileged access that Davidson and many others valued from the angle of Tarskian disquotational truth, while Burge’s adroit outsets of ‘ability of quoting’ and ‘bi-conditional’ for considering a thought as self-knowledge initiates a novel thought in the field of analytic philosophy. But Bilgrami’s innovative approach that criticized Burge by arguing that the dilemma between the narrow and broad content and conceptual explanation theses of concepts derives from the bifurcation of content theory. So we have to initiate the conception of trilema that wipe out the bifurcated contents. Bilgrami’s constraint thesis intends to the external determining concepts that are to be pertinent for the beliefs of the agents. He called his thesis as an individualistic externalism since the thesis refuses the role of social contents by supporting the speaker’s authority and it also appreciates externalism as it accepts the public nature of contents. A reformed outlook that the chapter looks engage here is truly a peripheral diagram that seizes a holistic derivation and advocates in defense of phenomenal avowals in the level of first person authority, but subsequently bestows significance on the socio-linguistic background of language.
