committed to wide content, but science tells us that content is narrow, does
that mean that folk psychology is in error, and should be replaced? That all
depends, plainly, on what it is that folk psychology is trying todo.
What, then, is our common-sense notion of content? Many of those who
defend narrow content donotthink that it is, or is a component of, our
common-sense conception. Thus Fodor (1987) thinks that the folk-psy-
chological notion iswide– indeed purely referential, dealing only in
worldly properties and individuals. (This is then a notion of content which
Russell himself would have been entirely at home with.) But he also
thought (he is no longer so sure; see his 1994) that it is imperative that we
should be able toconstructa notion of narrow content to serve as the basis
for a scientiWc psychology. Others (Burge, 1991) think that a notion of
narrow content is indeedlegitimate, but forms no part of our actual
common-sense psychology – maintaining that our actual notion of content
is a Russellian hybrid of reference plus Fregean mode of presentation.We
think, in contrast, that narrow content does (or should) form one strand in
our common-sense notion (a strand which Carruthers has elsewhere la-
belled ‘cognitive content’ – see his 1989; here we adopt the terminology of
‘explanatory content’), the other being purely referential (labelled ‘seman-
tic content’).
5.1 Two kinds of contentWe claim that there are two very diVerent perspectives which we can, and
regularly do, take towards the contents of people’s thoughts – that there
are two distinct kinds ofinterestwhich we can and do take in descriptions
of thought-content, each of which motivates a diVerent set of identity
constraints. Sometimes our interest in thoughts and thought-ascriptions is
eitherexplanatoryorpredictive. Often our main interest in the thoughts of
other people is to use them in such a way as to explain what those people
have done, or to predict what they will do. And often, from this perspec-
tive, it will be crucial to know the precise way in which the thinker
conceptualises the subject matter – it can make all the diVerence in ex-
plaining Oedipus’ remorse whether the content of his thought is described
as ‘I am married to Mother’ or as ‘I am married to Jocasta’. So our
principles of individuation will at least need to be Fregean, requiring
identity of mode of presentation for identity of thought-content. But
equally, from this explanatory and predictive perspective we are generally
notinterested in the truth or falsity of the thoughts ascribed. So the
principles of individuation can abstract away from the actual worldly
referents of the component concepts of the thought – such content can be
narrow.
156 Content for psychology