The Philosophy of Psychology

reference of that term, in our mouths, is of course tied to the constitution
of the stuVon Earth. There is, surely, nothing of deep signiWcance about
the nature of content to be derived from these facts – and certainly not a
refutation of the coherence of narrow content.

4 Explanation and causation

In this section we examine the respective roles of wide and of narrow
content in psychological explanation, asking whether either or both might
be causally relevant to behaviour, and concluding that only narrow con-
tent is genuinely causally explanatory. But we begin with an argument
against wide content, from its failure adequately to explain the behaviour
of a hallucinator.

4.1 Illusory demonstrative thoughts: the case against

The thoughts of our cat-hallucinator turn out to give rise to a powerful
argument against the ubiquity of wide content. Recall that it is a con-
sequence of the wide-content theory, as applied to the case of singular
thought, that in a case where there exists no actual object of thought (for
example, through hallucination or misinformation), then there exists no
singular thought either. For singular thoughts are supposed to be Russel-
lian, being partly individuated in terms of the objects thought about. In
such cases people are said toessay, or attempt to entertain, a singular
thought of a certain type, but to fail.
Thus, compare two examples: in the one case I am really confronted by a
cat, which I perceive and believe to be vicious; I think, ‘Thatcat is
dangerous,’ and lash out at it with my foot. In the other case everything is,
from my subjective perspective, exactly the same, and issues in an exactly
similar bodily movement, except that there is really no cat there; I am
merely hallucinating. Wide-content theorists will say that in theWrst case I
do entertain, and act on, a singular thought, but in the second case I do
not; it merelyseemsto me that I have done so. Narrow-content theorists
will say, in contrast, that in each case I entertain the very same type of
thought, which explains my action in virtue of instantiating the same
psychological (content-involving) law – the law, namely, that whenever
people take themselves to be confronted with something dangerous, then
they will,ceteris paribus, take action to deXect or avoid that threat. This
certainly accords well with the intuition that the two cases are, psychologi-
cally speaking, alike.
The immediate problem for the Russellian is to explain how, in the
hallucination example, my movement is genuinely an intentional action,

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