Sometimes, on the other hand, our interest in the thoughts of others is
communicative,orbelief-acquisitive. Often our perspective on the thoughts
of others is that their thoughts may give us something which we ourselves
may wish to believe or deny. And here Fregean modes of presentation are
of no relevance, we maintain. All that matters is that we should get hold of
whichworldly objects and properties the person’s thoughts concern. So
such contents are purely Russellian. It seems to us that the popular view
that our common-sense conception of content is a Russellian/Fregean
hybrid comes fromconXatingthese two perspectives, and/or from living on
a diet of examples which vacillate ambiguously between them.
Would we have to maintain, then, that our common-sense notion of
content is itself ambiguous? Are the identity conditions of the contents
ascribed in statements of the form, ‘A believes that P’, sometimes purely
referential, and sometimes narrow, depending upon the context? Not
necessarily. It may be that we have an unambiguous, unequivocal, notion
of content, but in such a way that the purpose-relativity of content is
written into the notion itself. Thus, ‘A believes that P’, may mean some-
thing like, ‘The content of A’s belief is similar enough to the contentI
would express by the assertion P for the purposes in hand’. Where the
purposes in hand are psychological (explanatory or predictive), the con-
straints imposed give us narrow content. But where the purposes are
communicative, then the constraints give us a purely truth-conditional
notion. But the content-sentence itself would mean the same both times.
It does seem to us quite likely that wedoemploy a notion of narrow
content when our main interest is psychological; and that where examples
are presented clearly in this light, they will evoke intuitions supporting
narrow content. Imagine a case where two ticket-holders in a local lottery –
Peter and Paul – are clamouring at the ticket-booth, shouting and ham-
mering on the door. We ask, ‘Why? Why are they both behaving like that?’
Answer: ‘Each believes the very same thing: that he has won the lottery.’
Here we feel no compunction in attributing thesamethought to them both,
despite the fact that each of their thoughts (of course) concerns a diVerent
subject – namely, himself. We are, therefore, apparently quite happy to
individuate the thoughts narrowly, abstracting from the diVerences in
subject matter for purposes of psychological explanation. Now extend the
example in such a way that truth becomes relevant. We ask, ‘Who has
won? Have they both won, or only one of them?’ Answer: ‘Only Peter has
won; Paul misread his ticket number.’ Now, I think, our intuitions switch.
We are inclined to insist that they thought diVerent things, because one
was right while the other was wrong. This is just as the position sketched
above would predict.
It seems likely, then, that one strand in our folk-psychological notion of
Folk-psychological content 157