MAKING SENSE OF THE INDIVIDUALISM-EXTERNALISM DEBATE

Individualism about the mind was introduced as a form of methodological solipsism in considering the nature of an individual's mental life and how we ought to theorize systematically about it. I drew on this conception of individualism in discussing the disciplining of psychology as a field of inquiry and nativism about the mind. In Chapter 1, I also provided a more precise characterization of individualism in psychology in terms of the notion of supervenience.

It is sometimes unclear to those outside of the philosophy of mind just how either the methodological solipsism or the supervenience formulation of individualism could give rise to a substantive debate about the mind and its study. Consider construals of each of these formulations that make either individualism or externalism seem trivially true.

Methodological solipsism in psychology is the view that psychological states should be construed without reference to anything beyond the boundary of the individual who has those states. It is in light of this view that the debate between individualists and externalists has sometimes been glossed in terms of whether psychological or mental states are “in the head.” But to the initiated and uninitiated alike, that is likely to sound like a puzzling issue to debate: Of course mental states are in the head! (“Where else could they be?,” as Robert Stalnaker once asked.) So this construal of individualism makes externalism a nonstarter, and so individualism seem trivially true.