Tyler Burge (; born 1946) is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...

who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...

. Burge has made contributions to many areas of

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...

, including the

philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are add ...

, philosophy of logic,

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epi ...

philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of Meaning (philosophy of language), meanin ...

, and the history of philosophy.

Education and career

In 1967, Burge received his

bachelor of arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...

from

Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the col ...

. He earned his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

in philosophy from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 1971 where he worked with Donald Davidson and John Wallace. He joined the UCLA faculty that year (1971), and has taught there ever since, with visiting professorships also at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

, and MIT. He is an elected Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

since 1993 and a Corresponding Fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars s ...

since 1999. In 2007, he was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

. He was the recipient of the 2010 Jean Nicod Prize.

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". 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). Pg 206 Thigh Muscles

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 natural kind term such as “water” depends on the nature of the physical world. Burge argues that the difference in the 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

theory of vision Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflect ...

, arguing that the contents of representations posited by a computational theory of vision, such as that pioneered by David Marr, are dependent on the environment of the organism's evolutionary history. (See Burge 1986.) Anti-individualism about thoughts 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 that

mental states A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definiti ...

cause behavior. (See, e.g., Fodor 1991.) Burge (1988) has argued that anti-individualism is compatible with knowledge of our own

. 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 Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

heavily informed by empirical psychology. 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." Another reviewer described it as "imperious" and "poorly written", offering "broad but shallow surveys of the sensory and perceptual powers of animals and infants".

Other philosophical work

In the history of philosophy, Burge has published articles on the philosophy of

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic p ...

and

René Descartes René Descartes ( or ; ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Ma ...

. A collection of his writings on Frege, along with a substantial introduction and several postscripts by the author, has been published (Burge, 2005). In

, he has written on such topics as self-knowledge, interlocution,

reasoning Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, langu ...

and

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remember ...

, as well as on self-reflection (Burge 2013). He is perhaps most well known for his contributions to the

, including his views on de re belief and, most notably, anti-individualism with respect to

mental content The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

, which is also known as externalism, the view that the content of one's thoughts depends partly on the external environment. A

festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the ...

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''.

Bibliography

Books

* 2005. ''Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege''. Oxford University Press, . * 2007. ''Foundations of Mind''. Oxford University Press, . * 2010. ''Origins of Objectivity''. Oxford University Press, . * 2013. ''Cognition Through Understanding: Self-Knowledge, Interlocution, Reasoning, Reflection''. Oxford University Press, . * 2022. ''Perception: First Form of Mind''. Oxford University Press, .

Articles (selected)

* 1977. "Belief De Re". ''The Journal of Philosophy'', Vol. 74, No. 6, pp. 338–362. * 1979. "Sinning against Frege". ''The Philosophical Review'', Vol. 88, No. 3, pp. 398–432. * 1979. "Individualism and the Mental". ''Midwest Studies in Philosophy'' 4: 73–121. * 1982. "Other Bodies". In Woodfield, Andrew, ed., ''Thought and Object''. New York: Oxford. * 1986. "Individualism and Psychology." ''Philosophical Review'' 45: 3-45. * 1986. "Frege on Truth". in Haaparanta & Hintikka (1986). * 1986. "Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind". ''The Journal of Philosophy'', Vol. 83, No. 12, pp. 697–720. * 1988. "Individualism and Self-Knowledge". ''The Journal of Philosophy'' 85: 649–663. * 1989. "Individuation and Causation in Psychology". ''Pacific Philosophical Quarterly'' 70: 303–322. * 1990. "Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning". in Bell & Cooper (1990). * 1992. "Frege on Knowing the Third Realm". ''Mind'', Vol. 101, pp. 633–650.12, pp. 697–720. * 1993. "Content Preservation". ''The Philosophical Review'', Vol. 102, No. 4, pp. 457–488. * 1996. "Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge". ''Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,'' New Series, Vol. 96 (1996), pp. 91–116. * 2003. "Reply to Loar". In Hahn and Ramberg (1991). * 2003. "Perceptual Entitlement". ''Philosophy and Phenomenological Research'', Vol. 67, pp. 503–548. * 2003. "Memory and Persons". ''The Philosophical Review'', Vol. 112, No. 3, pp. 289–337.

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

"Externalism about Mental Content" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"Narrow Mental Content" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Tyler Burge"
in the '' Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Burge, Tyler 1946 births 20th-century American essayists 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American essayists 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American philosophers Action theorists American historians of philosophy American logicians American male essayists American male non-fiction writers Analytic philosophers American consciousness researchers and theorists Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy Descartes scholars Empiricists Epistemologists Jean Nicod Prize laureates Living people Members of the American Philosophical Society Metaphysicians Ontologists Philosophers of language Philosophers of linguistics Philosophers of logic Philosophers of mind Philosophers of psychology Philosophers of social science Philosophy academics Philosophy writers Princeton University alumni Rationality theorists UCLA Philosophy University of California, Los Angeles faculty Wesleyan University alumni Distinguished professors of philosophy