Objective content. Does 'belief-holism' show that reductive dispositionalism about content could not be true? II - Alexander Miller

Abstract

Paul Boghossian (1989, 1990) has argued, on grounds concerning the holistic nature of belief fixation, that there are principled reasons for thinking that 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism about content cannot hope to satisfy a condition of extensional accuracy. I discern three separable strands of argument in Boghossian's work - the circularity objection, the open-endedness objection, and the certification objection - and argue that each of these objections fails. My conclusion is that for all that Boghossian has shown, 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.