Tyler Burge | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1946 (age 79–80) |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | |
| Philosophical work | |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic |
| Institutions | UCLA |
| Doctoral students | Linda Zagzebski |
| Main interests | |
| Notable ideas | Anti-individualism |
Tyler Burge (/bɜːrdʒ/; born 1946) is anAmericanphilosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy atUCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas ofphilosophy, including thephilosophy of mind,philosophy of logic,epistemology,philosophy of language, and thehistory of philosophy.
In 1967, Burge received hisbachelor of arts fromWesleyan University.[1] He earned hisPhD in philosophy fromPrinceton University in 1971 where he worked withDonald Davidson and John Wallace.[2] He joined the UCLA faculty that year (1971), and has taught there ever since, with visiting professorships also atStanford University,Harvard University, andMIT.[3] He is an elected Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993[4] and a Corresponding Fellow of theBritish Academy since 1999.[5] In 2007, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society.[6] He was the recipient of the 2010Jean Nicod Prize.[7]
Burge has argued foranti-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).
Burge argues in a similar fashion that a person's beliefs are dependent on the physical world. In histhought 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 anatural kind term such as “water” depends on the nature of thephysical world. Burge argues that the difference in thethoughts is attributable to the difference between the nature ofstuffs 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 fromreflection on the cases in the thought experiment.
Burge has extended the thesis of anti-individualism into the realm of thetheory of vision, arguing that the contents of representations posited by a computational theory of vision, such as that pioneered byDavid Marr, are dependent on the environment of the organism's evolutionary history. (See Burge 1986.)
Anti-individualism aboutthoughts is a controversial thesis. It has been disputed on a number of grounds. For example, it has been claimed that the thesis undermines a person's authoritative knowledge of their own thought contents. (See, e.g., McKinsey 1991.) It has also been thought to cause problems for our understanding of the way thatmental states cause behavior. (See, e.g., Fodor 1991.) Burge (1988) has argued that anti-individualism is compatible with knowledge of our ownmental states. He has also argued that it presents no problems for our understanding ofcausation. (See Burge 1989.)
Burge published his first book-length monograph in 2010, offering a philosophical account ofperception 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]
In thehistory of philosophy, Burge has published articles on the philosophy ofGottlob Frege andRené Descartes. A collection of his writings on Frege, along with a substantial introduction and several postscripts by the author, has been published (Burge, 2005). Inepistemology, he has written on such topics asself-knowledge,interlocution,reasoning andmemory, as well as on self-reflection (Burge 2013). He is perhaps most well known for his contributions to thephilosophy of mind, including his views onde re belief and, most notably,anti-individualism with respect tomental content, which is also known asexternalism, the view that the content of one's thoughts depends partly on the external environment. Afestschrift 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 byThe Philosopher's Annual.[12]
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