caused by one and the same person, then they have the same truth-
condition. Bad news for Fodor, we say.
Carruthers’ (1987a) proposal is initially somewhat similar. It is that we
can describe the narrow content entertained, in the case of hallucination
(for example, of a dangerous cat), by exploiting the alleged identity of
narrow content across contexts. We can say, in fact: ‘He is entertaining a
thought with the very same (narrow) content as hewouldhave had if there
had been a real cat there causing his experiences, and if he had entertained
a demonstrative thought, concerning the cat, thatitis dangerous’. And we
can say what is common to Petereand Petertwwhen each entertains a
thought they would express with the utterance, ‘Thatcat is dangerous’, by
saying: ‘Each is entertaining the very thought they would have whenever
there is a cat in front of them, causing their experiences in such a way as to
ground a demonstrative thought, and they think, of the perceptually
presented cat, thatitis dangerous’. Notice that these accounts are not
reductive– they do not attempt to reduce demonstrative thoughts to
something else. Rather, they just describe the content of one token demon-
strative thought by specifying it as being identical to the (narrow) content
of another.
Now in one way, of course, this proposal can seem like a cheat. It merely
usesa claimed identity of narrow content in order to describe the content
of a target thought, without attempting to tell us what narrow contentis,
or what the conditions of narrow-content identity are. Nevertheless, the
proposal is, we claim, suYcient to rebut the charge of incoherence levelled
against narrow content – the charge that, in a case of hallucination, there is
no way to describe the (putative) content of the singular thought enter-
tained. On the contrary, there is such a way, and we have just given it.
Moreover, the proposal leaves open the possibility of a more substantive
account of narrow content (in a way that Fodor’s proposal does not). It
might be said, for example, that the narrow content of the demonstrative
elementthat man, when grounded in a visual presentation, is given by the
location in egocentric space at which the man is represented. So all
tokenings of the thought, ‘That manis fat’, provided they represent the
man in question in the same position in the thinker’s egocentric space, will
count as having the very same narrow content, irrespective of any further
diVerences between the men and their circumstances. Of course, this is just
one highly debatable proposal. But it illustrates how the proposed ap-
proach to narrow content might admit of further supplementation.
Note, too, that on both of the above ways of characterising narrow
content (Fodor’s and Carruthers’), narrow content is not really a kind of
contentat all, if by that you mean something which has to have a unique
semantic value (true or false). For narrow contents do not, in themselves,
140 Content for psychology