This line of thought depends, among other things, upon the Enlightenment assumption that craft abilities are innate and widely distributed, and that, when rightly stimulated and trained, they allow craftsmen to become knowledgeable public persons.
Just as thought depends on the species or likenesses of external things, mental words are likenesses of conventional words and have exactly the same semantic force.
As Sally Haslanger (2000) and others have noted, however, the claims regarding male and female thinking on which this line of thought depends are not well supported.
To achieve this sort of law-likeness in thought depends both on the genuine attempt to judge for oneself and the determination to expose one's judgments to the scrutiny of others.
In the final analysis, Descartes thinks he shows that the occurrence of thought depends (ontologically) on the existence of a substantial self — to wit, on the existence of an infinite substance, namely God (cf. Med. 3, AT 7 48ff).
Both argue that, while a subject might be a priori justified in believing that she has a certain thought, and also a priori justified in thinking that the having of that thought depends on the presence of certain substances or communal practice in the environment, this a priori justification does not transmit to belief in the existence of those external substances or practices.
In other work, and compatibly with his swampman example, Davidson defends what Bridges (2006) describes as "transcendental externalism," a view according to which the very possibility of thought depends on a creature being involved in a complex causal relationship—"triangulation"—involving a second creature and a shared environment.
Those who suppose they can seriously damage particularism by specifying a few (probably fairly complex) invariant reasons do little to show that moral thought depends (as it was put in the Introduction above) on a suitable provision of principles (which we are now understanding as 'invariant reasons').
Now if the content of Lilian's thought that there is a tree in the quad is "broad", if the significance of her thought depends on factors outside Lilian's body, then it is indeed hard to see how this content could figure in a causal account of her actions, including Lilian's expressing her belief that there is a tree in the quad by uttering the sentence, "There is a tree in the quad".
Desgabets, having declared that all thoughts depend on movement, was especially concerned to defend his empiricist thesis against charges of materialism.
The soul must always be in commerce with the senses, and although our thoughts depend on the corporeal traces in the brain for their source or origin, it does not follow that our ideas must be corporeal, or even similar to corporeal things.
