Why is it that the conditions for successful communication, in general,
are as they are, requiring only mutual knowledge of worldly truth-con-
ditions? By way of answer, reXect on what communication is basicallyfor.
Communication is an important channel for the acquisition of new beliefs,
second only to vision in our cognitive economy. When people tell me
things, in general I believe them. This works because, when people believe
things, in general they believe truly. And then all that really matters, in
order to make linguistic communication a reliable method of belief-ac-
quisition, is that thetruth-conditionsof the beliefs at either end of the
process should be the same. When you assert something of the form, ‘a is
F’, then provided that I knowwhichthing you refer to by ‘a’ andwhich
property you designate by ‘F’, it doesn’t matter how diVerently these
things may be presented to you – if your thought is true, then so too will
mine be.
Very often communication takes place at one remove, by us being told
what someone else believes. To continue with the museum example given
above: suppose that Mary is a famous art-critic, and that you tell me,
‘Mary thinks that the new sculpture wasn’t worth what was paid for it.’
This gives me reason to believe what Mary believes, just as if I had heard
hersay, ‘That sculpture wasn’t worth it.’ And the same conditions for
understanding apply. In order for your statement to serve as a reliable
channel for the acquisition of a new belief, all that matters is that I should
get hold ofwhichsculpture Mary’s belief is about, and what she thought
about it. Mary’s modes of presentation matter not at all. So where our
interestis basically belief-acquisitive, the constraints on a correct descrip-
tion of Mary’s thought are simply that it should preserve the original
truth-conditions. And this gives us a notion of thought-content which is
purely truth-conditional.
This explains, we think, the strong pull of intuitions towards wide
content. Since there is, indeed, a notion of content –semantic content–
which is individuated by worldly truth-condition, we are apt, if we fail to
notice the diVerent perspectives on content-description, to think thatthe
notion of content must be Russellian, or world-involving. But the truth is
that we also employ a notion of content –explanatory content– which is
narrowly individuated, where our interest is in psychological explanation.
Although it does seem to us likely that common sense employsbotha
notion of narrow contentanda notion of wide content for diVerent
purposes, this is not really the crucial point. It would not matter to us if it
should turn out to beindeterminatewhether common sense employs two
distinct notions of content, or just one hybrid notion. What is important is
that, once we see that there are two quite diVerent perspectives we can take
on the notion of content, and two distinct purposes for which we employ
that notion, we see that weshouldemploy two distinct notions (or one
Folk-psychological content 159