We have now reached a point where I hope I have been successful in showing that Cartesian Rationalists are correct about perception – and so also about higher mental states: they are all proposition-like, cognitive, and constructive. Passive phenomenal states are inadequate for the job British Empiricists envisioned for them. But as said in the Introduction, this century – now almost closing – has seen a new attack on Cartesian Rationalism: a denial of Internalism altogether. To fully defend Cartesian Rationalism, I need to show that anti-Internalist attacks on it also fail. I begin that defense in this chapter by showing that for one set of concepts – that of the propositional attitudes – the content of those concepts is dependent only on the internal states of the organism, a conclusion at least compatible with Internalism, if not constitutive of it. Only one form of anti-Internalism is considered, a view I label, for historical reasons, “Instrumentalism.”

At the end of the previous chapter, I said that the main topic in this third part of the book would be apperception. However, these two tasks – defending Internalism and further investigating apperception – are closely related. The key to preferring Internalism to Instrumentalism has largely to do with the role apperception plays in our acquiring the concepts in question. Scientific Cartesianism and apperception are closely intertwined. So a major focus of this chapter is on apperceptive consciousness. In the next chapter, I will consider Externalist critiques of Cartesian Rationalism, and consider concept acquisition and content more broadly.