could ever doubt whetherthatcat is causingtheseexperiences
(that is, the experiences which now ground my demonstrative
reference to that cat), it seems quite wrong to make all demon-
strative thoughts involve reference to one’s current experiences.
For my experiences are not, normally, an object of attention in
such cases. And indeed, it surely seems possible for someone (a
young child, or an autistic person, say) to entertain the thought,
‘Thatcat is lost’ who does not yethave the concept ofexperience.These points give rise to an argument against the very coherence of narrow
content. For narrow contents are supposed to be available to be thought,
whether or not their putative worldly objects exist or are present. But if it
turns out that in the absence of an object there is no way of stating the
content of the putative singular thought, then it seems that there can be no
such world-independent content.
3 The coherence of narrow content
In this section we take up the challenge presented by the argument outlined
above. Note that it is a suppressed premise of the argument that if a
thought-content exists at all, then it can be speciWed by means of a
that-clause. That is to say, it is assumed that, if a singular thought really is
entertained in the hallucination case, then it must be possible for us tosay
what thought is entertained by means of a phrase of the form, ‘He is
thinkingthat such-and-such.’ This assumption is tacitly rejected in the
alternative proposals for specifying narrow content considered in section
3.1 below. It will then be explicitly examined and criticised in section 3.2.
3.1 Specifying narrow contentFodor (1987, ch.2) acknowledges that we cannotexpressa narrow con-
tent directly, using a that-clause; because any such clause will automati-
cally take on one or anotherwidecontent (that is, truth-condition). But
he thinks we can (as he puts it)sneak up onnarrow contents, providing
such contents with an indirect characterisation. Fodor maintains, in fact,
thatnarrow contents are functions from contexts to truth-conditions. Thus
the narrow content which I and my twin share when each of us says,
‘Water is wet’, is that unique content which, when ‘anchored’ on Earth
has the truth-condition,H 2 O is wet, and when anchored on Twearth has
the truth-condition,XYZ is wet. (Most of Fodor’s discussion concerns
natural-kind examples.) Similarly, the narrow content which we share
when each of us says, ‘Thatcat is dangerous’, is the unique content which,
138 Content for psychology