have truth-conditions, and are not, in themselves,aboutanything. And it
makes no sense to ask whether a narrow content, as such, is true or false.
Only when embedded in a particular context do narrow contents come to
have truth-conditions. Nevertheless, an individual tokening of a given
narrow content will normally have some particular truth-condition.
Hallucinatory cases aside, every time someone thinks, ‘Thatcat is danger-
ous’, their (narrow) thought comes to have some or other truth-condition,
through its embedding in a particular context. So one way to put the point
is that it is, properly, narrow contenttokens, rather than narrow content
types, which have truth-conditions, and which are the bearers of truth-
values.
3.2 Contents and that-clauses: undermining an assumptionThe assumption which was implicit in the argument for the Russellian
(object-involving) status of singular thought which we discussed in section
2.2, is that any genuine content has to be speciWable in a that-clause. The
responses of Fodor and Carruthers considered above take it for granted
that this assumption is false. Here we shallarguethat it is. But note,Wrst of
all, that the assumption is quite widespread in philosophy. Thus, you will
Wnd people arguing that dogs and cats do not really have beliefs (David-
son, 1975), on the grounds that we cannotdescribetheir beliefs usingour
concepts – we cannot say, for example, ‘The cat believes that the bird is
edible’, since the conceptbirdhas many conceptual connections (for
example, to ‘living thing’) which we might be loath to attribute to an
animal. Yet the assumption in question appears to be wholly unmotivated.
Obviously this is so if (like us) you are arealistabout propositional
attitudes, thinking that beliefs and desires are what they are independently
of our descriptions of them. But the same is surely true even if, like
Davidson, you are an interpretationalist about the attitudes, maintaining
that there is nothingmoreto being a believer/desirer than being a creature
whose behaviour can be successfully predicted and explained by suitable
attributions of beliefs and desires. For why insist that the descriptions used
to generate predictions and explanationshaveto be couched in the form of
a that-clause? We do agree that being able to specify the contents of others’
intentional states in this way greatly enhances our predictive and ex-
planatory powers. For, as we noted above in chapter 4 (section 3), at-
tribution of a belief-content allows us to run a simulation on the content
and so, by inferential enrichment, attribute many other beliefs – and we
can only run a simulation when we have a complete content to insert into
our own (oV-line) inferential systems. By contrast, our mapping of the
beliefs of animals and very young children is patchy and incomplete. But
The coherence of narrow content 141