Tyler Burge

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Tyler Burge
Born1946 (age 77–78)
Alma mater
  • UCLA
Doctoral studentsLinda Zagzebski
Main interests
Notable ideas
Anti-individualism

Tyler Burge (

UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy
.

Education and career

In 1967, Burge received his

MIT.[3] He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993[4] and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy since 1999.[5] In 2007, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[6] He was the recipient of the 2010 Jean Nicod Prize.[7]

Philosophical work

Anti-individualism

Burge has argued for anti-individualism. In Burge's words, anti-individualism is a theory that asserts the following: “individuating many of a person or animal’s mental kinds … is necessarily dependent on relations that the person bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment".[8] This view, and some variants, has been called "content externalism", or just "externalism." Burge favors "anti-individualism" over this terminology, in part because he considers the central issue to be what individuates content, rather than where contents may be located, as "externalism" may suggest. (Burge 2003, 435–6).

The patient's belief that arthritis is in his thigh depends on conventional meaning as determined by the linguistic community.

Burge argues in a similar fashion that a person's beliefs are dependent on the physical world. In his thought experiment he attempted to demonstrate that all thoughts and beliefs have wide contents.

In “The Meaning of Meaning” (1975), Putnam had argued that the meaning of a

thoughts is attributable to the difference between the nature of stuffs in the respective physical environments. As with the "arthritis" thought experiment, dependence of thought on the physical environment is a conclusion that is supposed to follow purely from reflection
on the cases in the thought experiment.

Burge has extended the thesis of anti-individualism into the realm of the

David Marr
, are dependent on the environment of the organism's evolutionary history. (See Burge 1986.)

Anti-individualism about

mental states. He has also argued that it presents no problems for our understanding of causation
. (See Burge 1989.)

Origins of Objectivity

Burge published his first book-length monograph in 2010, offering a philosophical account of perception heavily informed by empirical psychology.[9] The book was described by one reviewer as "an absolutely terrific work, conceived and executed at a scale and level of ambition rarely seen in contemporary philosophy."[10] Another reviewer described it as "imperious" and "poorly written", offering "broad but shallow surveys of the sensory and perceptual powers of animals and infants".[11]

Other philosophical work

In the

mental content, which is also known as externalism, the view that the content of one's thoughts depends partly on the external environment. A festschrift devoted mostly to Burge's work on anti-individualism, including extensive replies from Burge to the contributors, has also appeared (Hahn and Ramberg 2003). Since 1978, four of Burge's articles have been chosen as among "the ten best" of the year by The Philosopher's Annual.[12]

Bibliography

Books

Articles (selected)

Notes

References and further reading

  • Bell, David & Cooper, Neil (eds.). 1990. The Analytic Tradition, Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Fodor, Jerry. 1991. "A Modal Argument for Narrow Content". The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 88, No. 1, pp. 5–26.
  • Haaparanta, Leila & Hintikka, Jaakko (eds.). 1986. Frege Synthesized. Boston: D. Reidel.
  • Hahn, Martin and Bjørn Ramberg (eds.). 2003. Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • McKinsey, Michael. 1991. "Anti-Individualism and Privileged Access". Analysis 51: 9–16.
  • Maria J. Frapolli and Esther Romero (eds.). 2003. Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind: Essays on Tyler Burge, CSLI Publications, .

External links