On the Incompatibility between Externalism and Cartesian Account of Self-Knowledge

The paper aims to examine the compatibility problem between externalism about mental content and self-knowledge. First, I explore the main anti-compatibilist arguments and objections to them and conclude that anti-compatibilist views imply the shift from the ontological issue to the epistemic one. Second, I ar­gue that compatibilists, in its turn, regard this shift as unjustified. The reason for that is that they do not accept the Cartesian introspective model of self-knowledge.

Keywords: internalism, externalism, anti-compatibilism, compatibilism, mental content, mental state, belief, self-knowledge, privacy, Cartesianism.