Semantic Externalism

On October 21 Robert Varley was arrested for seeking to sell weapons to terrorists. Over the past three months the FBI had conducted a sting, posing as a representative of Al Qaeda. Mr. Varley, who owns a manufacturing business in West Virginia, was approached by an undercover FBI agent seeking to purchase a large quantity of "dual-use" equipment. The FBI agent informed Mr. Varley on 8 separate occasions that the supplies would be used as weapons in anti-US terrorist attacks. Semantic Externalist Russel Nguyen will defend Mr. Varley. Mr. Nguyen argues that because Mr. Varley had never been approached by actual terrorists and only by FBI agents, when Mr. Varley expressed approval of selling dual-use equipment for use in terrorist attacks, he was actually expressing approval of selling equipment to an undercover FBI agent. The meaning of Mr. Varley's statements, which were recorded and will be used as evidence in the trial, must be interpreted in the context in which they were expressed, and their meaning is partly determined by external reality. Mr. Nguyen claims that Mr. Varley is guilty of nothing more than cooperating with a US government agency. The FBI is not impressed by Mr. Nguyen's argument. They argue that since the mental state of Mr. Varley was identical to that of a person approached by actual terrorists, within Mr. Varley's own reality a crime has been committed. Since no experiment performed by Mr. Varley revealed a distinction between an FBI sting and actual terrorists, the two situations are one and the same. Solopsist Michelle Clunn argued that the FBI's argument does not go far enough. No experiment performed by Mr. Varley could reveal that he was not a brain in a vat being dropped from a three-story building on a passing pedestrian. According to Ms. Clunn the Justice Department should be prosecuting Mr. Varley for all crimes that experiment cannot rule out. In response to criticism from Mr. Nguyen that this would be "a mockery of innocent until proven guilty", Ms. Clunn said "we cannot rule out" the possibility that someone has proven Mr. Varley guilty of all these crimes. The case has been dubbed a "philosophical judgment day". "The federal courts of the United States will have to decide, once and for all, whether statements derive their meaning only from the mind of the speaker, or in part from the external world" said Louis Patmos, a lawyer familiar with the case. Mr. Varley will be tried by a federal district court in West Virginia.