content isexplanatory, conforming to narrow principles of individuation.
This is just as it should be if, as we suggested in chapter 2, our folk
psychology embodies a set of more-or-less explicit psychologicallawsor
nomic tendencies, which would then require a notion of narrow content for
their proper formulation, if the arguments given above are correct. If this is
right, then we do not have to revise or reconstruct folk psychology in order
to get something which might serve as an appropriate basis for scientiWc
psychology. On the contrary, it isalreadyof the right form, and we might
expect folk and scientiWc psychologies to merge seamlessly into one an-
other.
It is worth stressing, however, that the identity-conditions of the
thoughts we attribute is one thing, the surface form of the sentences we use
in doing it may be quite another. We rely on a variety of conventions and
dodges in communicating explanatory content, often leaving the latter to
be garnered from the context. Thus in the example above we explained the
behaviour of the lottery-ticket holders by saying, ‘Each believes thathehas
won.’ But of course they themselves would not employ a third-person
singular mode of presentation in their thought. Here we knowwhich
(narrow) thought is being entertained – it is the same thoughtIwould
express by saying, ‘I have won’ – but we use an indirect means of describing
it.
5.2 Semantic contentIt seems to us likely that we also employ a notion of content which is purely
referential, or Russellian; and that we do so when our interest in thoughts
and thought-descriptions is basically belief-acquisitive. First, let us make a
point about linguistic communication. It seems to us that successful com-
munication, in many contexts, doesnotrequire mutual knowledge of
modes of presentation, or of Fregean senses. All that is necessary is that
there should be mutual knowledge ofwhatis being saidabout what.
Consider the following example. You are a security guard in a museum, to
which a new sculpture has recently been delivered. You are sitting outside
the room where the sculpture is the only work of art on display, but you
have not, as yet, seen it yourself. You now hear a visitor in the room say,
‘That sculpture wasn’t worth what they paid for it.’ Do you understand
this remark? It seems to us that you plainly do (contraEvans, 1982). You
knowwhichthing is being talked about, and you know what is being said
about it. But you neithersharewith the speaker a mode of presentation of
the referent of their demonstrative, nor know anything about what that
mode of presentation may be like (after all, for all you know the speaker
may be blind, and feeling the sculpture with their hands; this makes not a
bit of diVerence to your success in understanding them).
158 Content for psychology