The Philosophy of Psychology

6 Content for psychology

In this chapter we review, and contribute to, the intense debate which has
raged concerning the appropriate notion ofcontentfor psychology (both
folk and scientiWc). Our position is that the case for wide content (that is,
content individuated in terms of its relations to worldly objects and
properties) in any form of psychology is weak; and that the case for narrow
content (that is, content individuated in abstraction from relations to the
world) is correspondingly strong. But we also think that for some com-
mon-sense purposes a notion of wide content is perfectly appropriate.

1 Introduction: wide versus narrow

The main reasons why this debate is important have to do with the
implications for folk and scientiWc psychology, and the relations between
them. (But it will also turn out, in chapter 9, that the defensibility of
narrow content is crucial to the naturalisation of consciousness.) For if, as
some suggest, the notion of content employed by folk psychology is wide,
whereas the notion which must be employed in scientiWc psychology is
narrow, then there is scope here for conXict. Are we to say that science
shows folk psychology to befalse? Or can the two co-exist? And what if the
very idea of narrow content is incoherent, as some suggest? Can scientiWc
psychology employ a notion of content which is externally individuated?
Or would this undermine the very possibility of content-involving psychol-
ogy?
Some wide-content theorists, such as McDowell (1986, 1994), believe
that the debate has profound implications for philosophy generally, par-
ticularly for epistemology. McDowell maintains that narrow-content
theorists place an intermediary between the mind and the world, somewhat
in the way that Cartesians and sense-data theorists did, making sceptical
worries especially pressing. We believe that this is a muddle. The debate is
about the individuation-conditions for content, not about referential
semantics, or about the phenomenology of thinking. Narrow-content
theorists should agree that each token thoughtwill havetruth-conditions,

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