explanation, supplemented by relational facts, can sustain thesameset of
counterfactuals. Set out in more detail, the Peacocke example is this:
(1) I see a person in the garden;
(2) I want to draw your attention to him;
(3) so I move my hand in his direction.
And his point is that this explanation works whether or not anything more
is known of the spatial relationship between myself and the person in
question (for example, whether or not you know where I was in the room
at the time). And it is true that if he had been in a diVerent position in the
garden then, provided that (1) and (2) remain true, I would have moved my
hand in that direction instead.
Yet these features of the explanation can, surely, be replicated in a
narrow-content account. A narrow-content explanation of the case would
be this:
(i) I experience a person-as-represented in a particular direction in ego-
centric space (a content I can entertain whether or not it is really that
particular person, or indeed anyone, who is there);
(ii) I want to draw your attention to the presence of the person I rep-
resent;
(iii) a particular person is in fact the veridical cause of the experience in (i);
(iv) so I move my hand in his direction.
Here, too, the explanation works whether or not anything further is known
about where the person and I are. And here, too, the right counterfactuals
are sustained: if he had been in a diVerent position then, provided that (i),
(ii) and (iii) remain true, I would have moved my hand in that direction.
The advantage, indeed, isWrmly with the narrow-content explanation of
the case. For Peacocke will be forced to postulate three psychologically
distinct explanations for the cases where (a) I perceive the person in the
garden, (b) I perceive not him but his identical twin brother, and (c) where
I am hallucinating; for I shall be said to entertain diVerent thoughts in each
case. But the narrow-content theorist can advance exactly the same form
of explanation for (a) and (b) – the only diVerence being that a diVerent
person will be picked out in clause (iii). Moreover, explanation (c) will only
diVer in that clause (iii) is dropped altogether – which gives us just the right
counterfactuals, since all that is then relevant is where my experience
representsa person as being. So on a narrow-content account thepsycho-
logicalaspect of the explanation will be the same for all three cases.
A wide-content theorist may reply to the diYculties we have been
raising, by saying that there is nospecialproblem in explaining how wide
154 Content for psychology