564 Karen Neander
Opinion is divided as to whether this response is satisfactory. Those who find it
unsatisfactory are often moved, I think, by the connections between consciousness
and intentionality. While they might be willing to concede that “water” and
“tiger” and the like can have hidden or unknown essences, intentionality seems
different. It is intuitive, as I said before, that it would at least seem to Swampman
that he was experiencing intentional mental states, and that very seeming seems to
be an intentional state. There are powerful intuitions to the effect that phenomenal
consciousness is intrinsic and hence shared by doppelgangers, and these intuitions
about phenomenal consciousness seem to have implications for intentionality. They
seem to imply that intentionality must be intrinsic and shared by doppelgangers
too.
However, when assessing these intuitions it is important to keep in mind that
Swampman does share with Davidson (at the moment of Swampman’s inception)
whatever narrow content Davidson has. This is trivial, since narrow content is
defined as something that is shared by intrinsic doppelgangers, like Swampman
and Davidson at the moment of Swampman’s inception (along with their suitably
co-ordinated Twin-Earth “twins”, Matrix-trapped “twins”, and so on). Those who
find themselves under the sway of powerful Swampman intuitions need to consider
whether this shared narrow content should placate them. It is an interesting and
much discussed question what narrow content amounts to, and one we cannot en-
ter into here. But if you think that narrow content is to some extent normative, for
instance, then you should think that Swampman has some content that is to some
extent normative. And this should be true of you, even if you support teleose-
mantics for ordinary truth-evaluative content. Teleosemantics is not inconsistent
with a notion of narrow content per se. It is only inconsistent with the claim
that narrow content is ordinary truth evaluative content. And this borders on the
commonplace. That narrow content is not ordinary truth evaluative content was
an implication of the Putnam twin- Earth thought experiments that gave rise to
the literature on narrow content.
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American Philosophical Association, 60: 441–58, 1987.our word “water” refers to water (H20) and not twin-water (XYZ), even if we do not know that
water is H20. Our Twin-Earth “twins” refer to twin-water, not water, using the same vocable
(“water”).