intention to produce something for sitting upon. Does this mean that
chairhoodis causally relevant to the eVects which any given chair has?
Surely not. If I trip over a chair in the dark and break my leg, then it is not
because it is a chairthat I break my leg – it is not because the object I trip
over was created with a certain intention in mind. Rather, the cause of the
break is that I caught my foot on an object of a certain mass, rigidity, and
shape. The fact that it was achairwhich had those properties is causally
irrelevant. (The point, here, is essentially the same as the one made above
concerning the causal relevance of the mosquito in relation to malaria – the
causal powers of the bite depend upon its intrinsic properties, not its
causation by the mosquito.) Then so too, it seems to us, in connection with
wide content. The fact that my thought was caused by one particular cat
rather than another, or by a sample of H 2 O rather than of XYZ, is
irrelevant to its causal powers. And then to individuate mental states
widely, in terms of their extra-cranial causes, is to individuate them in a
way which is irrelevant to the causal status of the mental.
Peacocke (1993) has argued that what wide contents (contents relation-
ally described) explain, arerelational properties of movements. Thus, one
and the same movement of my hand can be both a movementtowards
someone in the garden, and a movementnorthwards. But only the former is
explained by saying that I wanted to draw your attention to that person’s
presence. For diVerent counterfactuals are sustained. If that person had
been in a diVerent position in the garden then I would still have pointed
towards him (given that I perceive him), but I would no longer have
pointed northwards. Peacocke claims that only wide contents can give us
this pattern of explanation of relationally described movements by rela-
tionally described mental states; only wide contents give us the right set of
counterfactuals.
We have two points to make. TheWrst is that sustaining counterfactuals
is not the same thing as being a cause. For example, imagine a wave
breaking on the seashore, destroying as it does so a particular sand-castle.
And suppose that breaking waves always producesurf(aWlm of bubbles
on their breaking edge). Then the following counterfactuals are true: (a) if
the surf had not been present, then the sand-castle would not have broken;
(b) if the sand-castle had not been broken, then the surf would not have
been present. But the surf is not the cause of the destruction. Rather, the
sand-castle is destroyed by the wave, which also causes the surf. So, the
fact that wide contents sustain counterfactuals does not show that such
contents are causes. Rather, the wide content may just supervene in a
law-like way on what really does do the causing (that is, a narrow content
which happens to have a particular worldly cause).
Our second point (see also Segal, 1989a) is that a narrow-content
Explanation and causation 153