That phrase “just in case it is true” seemed problematic / suspicious but I didn’t know what to make of it (besides that it’s way vaguer than the extreme internal end).
My first guess is b/c Pettigrew has some bias or preconceived idea about it. One option is that he already thinks it’s obviously right or wrong (I’m not sure which). Maybe he sees it as circular (or otherwise obviously flawed) so is presenting it like that.
Maybe he doesn’t understand it, or can’t give a better explanation (or doesn’t want to). Thinking about Author Goals and Errors – if Pettigrew is being trialist (which the sociology references and wtf quotes are consistent with) then maybe he’s deliberately being dismissive.
He could also be saying it out of laziness; like everyone already knows what he means so why put more effort in.
WRT writing, I think it’s likely that[1] he edited the paper and got feedback on it, etc. (Maybe the missing “the” (and “that”) were errors introduced after a late edit.) So there’s a few reasons he might not have bothered writing something more specific:
- it wasn’t an issue for reviewers, so there wasn’t much attention given to it (or none of the reviewers paid attention to it anyway)
- it’s not relevant. if he never really engages with extreme externalism anyway, then there’s no point defining it well b/c he’ll never come back to it or reference it (or if he does, defining it simplistically like that might be useful for his argument).
- he might be hiding that he doesn’t understand it, so avoids being specific.
Broadly speaking: Pettigrew introduces normal internalism/externalism as like extreme internalism and everything else. But then immediately says there’s a spectrum. This could be a tactic to get some of the benefits of externalism without conceding that externalism is right, he can still claim that he (and his buddies) are somewhat internalist (this works for basically any position on the spectrum).
He might also see extreme externalism as unattainable. It could be an ideal we can’t get to but can get close (sorta like objective truth in CR), or that it’s so crazy that it’s unserious / not worth dealing with.
he states/implies that there were reviews/edits in the footnote on the first page. ↩︎