A modern descendant of Descartes's evil-demon scenario, asking how one can know one is not merely a brain in a vat of nutrients, electrically stimulated by a computer to have exactly the experiences of an ordinary embodied life. Hilary Putnam, who gave the argument its contemporary form in Reason, Truth and History (1981), also offered an influential reply: if reference is fixed by causal relations to the world, a vat-brain's word vat could not refer to a real vat, so the sentence I am a brain in a vat is self-undermining if uttered by a vat-brain. The scenario remains a central test case for external-world scepticism and for semantic externalism about content.
Facts
Origin YearHilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 1981, chapter 1. Classification
Position Kind Connections
Associated With
Putnam gave the scenario its contemporary form and its semantic-externalist reply in Reason, Truth and History (1981).
Source Brain in a Vat Argument (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
In Branch
Sources
1. Brain in a Vat Argument (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Brain in a Vat Argument, on Putnam
In his Reason, Truth and History (1981), Hilary Putnam first presented the argument that we cannot be brains in a vat
Brain in a Vat Argument
The Brain in a Vat thought-experiment is most commonly used to illustrate global or Cartesian skepticism.
- Associated With: Hilary Putnam
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