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Frontiers of Philosophy in China

ISSN 1673-3436

ISSN 1673-355X(Online)

CN 11-5743/B

Postal Subscription Code 80-983

Front. Philos. China    2009, Vol. 4 Issue (4) : 604-615    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11466-009-0040-3
Research articles
Narrow memory and wide knowledge: An argument for the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge
TIAN Ping,
Research Center for Value and Culture, School of Philosophy and Sociology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
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Abstract The development of the semantic externalism in the 1970s was followed by a debate on the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. Boghossian’s memory argument is one of the most important arguments against the compatibilist view. However, some compatibilists attack Boghossian’s argument by pointing out that his understanding of memory is internalistic. Ludlow and others developed the externalist view of memory to defend the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, the externalist view of memory undermines the epistemic status of memory since it gives memory a burden that is too heavy for it to carry. This paper argues that only if we take the content of memory to be narrow and take that of self-knowledge to be wide and replace Cartesian self-knowledge with contextually constrained self-knowledge, can the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge be effectively defended.
Keywords externalism      self-knowledge      memory      wide content      narrow content      
Issue Date: 05 December 2009
 Cite this article:   
TIAN Ping. Narrow memory and wide knowledge: An argument for the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge[J]. Front. Philos. China, 2009, 4(4): 604-615.
 URL:  
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fpc/EN/10.1007/s11466-009-0040-3
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fpc/EN/Y2009/V4/I4/604
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