rather than thought-tokenswhich are the primary bearers of truth-values.
For recall that narrow-content theorists do not deny that thoughts have
truth-conditions; they just deny that thoughts (as types) are to be in-
dividuated in terms of their truth-conditions. So if it is thought-tokens
which are the bearers of truth-values, then we can say that Mary and Joan
are both thinking thoughts of the very same type, with the very same
(narrow) content; but since they entertain distincttokensof that type, the
one can be true while the other is false.
Another – more powerful – argument picks up on, and defends, the
Russellian consequence that a singular thought mustfail to existin the
absence of an appropriate object. (If singular thoughts are individuated by
their relation to the object referred to, in such a way that the object is part
of the identity of the thought, then if there is no object, there is no thought
either.) Thus suppose that I hallucinate the presence of a cat, and think to
myself, ‘Thatcat is lost.’ On the Russellian view, I here attempt, butfail,to
think a singular thought. It merelyseemsto me that I have thought a
demonstrative thought, when I have not. Now if we wish to reject the
Russellian view, we shall need to avoid this consequence. And that means
Wnding a way of sayingwhatthought I succeed in thinking in the case of the
hallucinated cat. A further argument for externalism, then, is that none of
the available alternatives seems successful.
In particular, the content of the (putative) singular thought, ‘Thatcat is
lost’ is not the same as the content of anydescriptivethought, which would
be available for me to entertain (but which would then be false) in the case
of the non-existent cat. (For these purposes we assume the truth of
Russell’s Theory of DeWnite Descriptions, according to which a statement
of the form ‘The F is G’ should be analysed as saying ‘There exists one and
only one [relevant] F and it is G’.)
E.g. (1): the thoughtD‘The cat in my oYce is lost’ (supposing that I am in
my oYce at the time). For I may doubt this, while continuing to
believe thatthatcat is lost, if I forget where I am. So the thoughts
are distinct by the Fregean intuitive criterion of diVerence. Alter-
natively, I might believe that there aretwocats in my oYce, and
so deny thatthecat in my oYce is lost, while continuing to believe
thatthatcat is lost.
E.g. (2): the thoughtD‘The cat overthereis lost.’ For again, since in a
hall of mirrors I might wonder, ‘Isthatcat overthere?’, I might
doubt whether the cat over there is lost while continuing to
believe thatthatcat is lost.
E.g. (3): the thoughtD‘The cat now causingthesevery experiences is lost’
(contraSearle, 1983, ch.8). For while it seems implausible that I
Arguments for wide content 137