This collection of new essays explores the implications of semantic externalism for self-knowledge and skepticism.

Externalism about knowledge is thriving in contemporary epistemology. Nonetheless, externalism is too often caricatured as merely reliabilism, too often reduced to simply externalism about justification, and rarely considered as a cohesive family of related but importantly different views. Externalism About Knowledge addresses all of these issues by bringing new essays from leading externalist epistemologists working on seven different branches of this tradition: process reliabilism, tracking views, safety views, virtue epistemology, proper functionalism, naturalized epistemology, and knowledge first epistemology. This collection highlights their unity, their differences, their interconnections, and their most recent challenges, developments, and extensions.

Starting in the middle -- Epistemic possibilities and the knowledge argument -- Locating ourselves in the world -- Notes on models of self-locating belief -- Phenomenal and epistemic indistinguishability -- Acquaintance and essence -- Knowing what one is thinking -- After the fall.

Michael Bergmann provides a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism, developing his theory of justification by imposing both a proper function and a no-defeater requirement.

One of the most provocative projects in recent analytic philosophy has been the development of the doctrine of externalism, or, as it is often called, anti-individualism. While there is no agreement as to whether externalism is true or not, a number of recent investigations have begun to explore the question of what follows if it is true. One of the most interesting of these investigations thus far has been the question of whether externalism has consequences for the doctrine that we have authoritative, a priori self-knowledge of our mental states. The selected works presented in this volume, some previously published, some new, are representative of this debate and open up new questions and issues for philosophical investigation, including the connection between externalism, self-knowledge, epistemic warrant, and memory.

Semantic externalism is the view that the meanings of referring terms, and the contents of beliefs that are expressed by those terms, are not fully determined by factors internal to the speaker but are instead bound up with the environment. The debate about semantic externalism is one of the most important but difficult topics in philosophy of mind and language, and has consequences for our understanding of the role of social institutions and the physical environment in constituting language and the mind. In this long-needed book, Jesper Kallestrup provides an invaluable map of the problem. Beginning with a thorough introduction to the theories of descriptivism and referentialism and the work of Frege and Kripke, Kallestrup moves on to analyse Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, Burge’s arthritis argument and Davidson’s Swampman argument. He also discusses how semantic externalism is at the heart of important topics such as indexical thoughts, epistemological skepticism, self-knowledge, and mental causation. Including chapter summaries, a glossary of terms, and an annotated guide to further reading, Semantic Externalism an ideal guide for students studying philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.