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Internalism about a range of psychological states and contents is the view that those contents of those states are narrow. Externalism about a range of psychological states and contents is the view that those contents of those states are wide. Someone who accepts the lines of thought about the Oscars and Alf articulated in §2 above is an externalist with respect to certain contents that are attributed to belief in common sense psychology.
There have been two chief motivations for internalism. One is an intuition that wide contents fail to capture the way things appear from a subject’s subjective point of view. Some people have the intuition that, for example, if the two Oscars, thirsty, on a hot day, were to say “A glass of cold water would be a fine thing,” they would be giving voice to the same subjective seeming (Blackburn 1984). The intuition can be bolstered by noting that on an externalist view, if Oscar1 were to travel to Twin Earth and live there for many years, his “water” concept would come correctly to apply to XYZ, rather than H2O. But he would not notice this switch in content: as far he was concerned, the content of his “water” thoughts would have been the same all along (e.g., Larson and Segal 1995).
The second main motivation for internalism has been the idea that, whatever the Twin Earth experiments show about the way we ascribe thoughts in ordinary common sense psychology, good scientific psychology does or would also attribute narrow contents (see Individualism, methodological).
Segal (1989) argued for such a conclusion using twin arguments that focus on names that have no referent in their environment. Imagine an Egyptologist, Brian, who reasonably but falsely believes he has good evidence of an ancient Egyptian princess called “Anka,” and believes that Anka lived near Luxor. Twin Earth is just like Earth, except that there, the evidence available to Twin Brian is genuine evidence of a real Twin Earth Egyptian princess called “Anka.” Good explanations of Brian’s thought and behavior (such as his traveling to Luxor to pursue his research) require attributing to him a content expressed by his word “Anka.” But the existence of this content does not depend on its relation to any individual, Anka, on Earth. Further, the argument goes, attributing that same content to Twin Brian would suffice to explain his thoughts and behavior. The best psychology would capture the similarities between Brian’s and Twin Brian’s concepts, and attribute to them the same contents. These contents would account for the concepts’ cognitive roles somewhat in the way Fregean sense was intended to.
Brian Loar (1988) argued that contents individuated by social environment, in the way Burge describes, can be unsuitable for psychological explanation. Suppose Alf learns French and understands that “arthrite” applies to inflammations of the joints only. He does not realize that “arthrite” and “arthritis” are synonymous and continues to think that the condition in his thigh might be correctly called “arthritis.” The social content of “arthrite” and “arthritis” is the same. But in this scenario, Alf would express different beliefs with different contents by the two words. Internalists would argue that these different contents are narrow (e.g., Segal 2000).