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ABSTRACT
This paper presents some thoughts on the possibility and nature of shared, representational content-individuating perspectives on objects, properties, and kinds (or just ‘things’). If we think that correct specifications of a thinker’s representational contents in general, and thought content and concepts more specifically, characterize the thinker’s epistemic perspective, and we want to make sense of the idea that thinkers share concepts and communicate shared thoughts, then we had better make sense of shared perspectives on things. But this isn’t so easy (hence ‘possibility’ in the opening sentence). If we are guided by a form of naturalist externalism (such as various teleosemantic approaches or Fodor’s asymmetric dependence theory) and think of representational content in extensional terms (individuated by what a representation refers to), we can account for shared contents but risk leaving thinkers’ epistemic perspectives—their ways (especially different possible ways) of thinking about things—out of the picture. If we are guided by individualist internalism, we can capture a thinker’s epistemic perspective perfectly—so perfectly, in such a fine-grained, individualistically tailored way, that prospects for a usable notion of a shared conceptual perspective are dim. Working from the anti-individualist framework defended and developed by Tyler Burge, I explore a middle-path. A persistent, central strand of criticism of Burge centers on the complaint that anti-individualism is hopeless for capturing thinkers’ perspectives. Well, if we pay attention to how different kinds of concepts (for example, ARTHRITIS, SOFA, and FORTNIGHT) are individuated by perspectives that are constituted in different ways, and if we tweak a few details of some of Burge’s most famous thought experiments, and if in turn we reconsider some presumed implications about the associated counterfactual possibilities, and if we reject some of Burge’s most controversial examples of the putative coherence of doubting conceptual truths, and if we are willing to countenance a result that somewhat blurs the line between anti-individualism and individualism [welp], then maybe, just maybe...