Content: Wide vs. Narrow
[entry for the Routledge Enclyclopedia of Philosophy]
Kent Bach
A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent
with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of
affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and
thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The
contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water
and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should
depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external
relations. That is, a person could be in just those states, their
perspective could be just the same, and these mental states could play
just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap
for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some
imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that
thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and
social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that
there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises
the referential relations that mental states (and their constituents)
bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the
determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether
both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they
are connected.
1. Motivating the distinction
2. Twin Earth thought experiments
3. Two kinds of content?
1. Motivating the Distinction
Many of our mental states, including our perceptions, memories, and
beliefs, represent things in the world and properties of those things
(see PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES). But this fact seems to produce a
dilemma. On the one hand, representational states are what they are in
virtue of how they represent things to be. That is, they are most
appropriately individuated (distinguished from one another) by their
different contents, which are comprised of things in the world (objects
and their properties and relations). On the other hand, insofar as
these states play causal roles in our psychologies, they do so because
of how the world seems to one, and presumably that is solely a matter of
what is 'in the head'. Their psychological roles would be just the same
even if one were a brain in a vat or a victim of Descartes's evil demon. The
dilemma, then, is to reconcile the apparent facts that the representational
character of mental states depends on their external relations and that their
causal efficacy depends on their internal properties (see INDIVIDUALISM,
METHODOLOGICAL). The distinction between wide and narrow content
has been thought to resolve this dilemma.
Is this a genuine dilemma? Leaving aside such skeptical suggestions
as that the contents of psychological states have no causal efficacy (see
MENTAL CAUSATION), one might argue that the dilemma is illusory
because, strictly speaking, contents *are* internal properties. Contrary
to what many philosophers have supposed, the mere fact that the notion
of content is connected with notions like reference and truth conditions
does not mean that content is external. For this is compatible with a
Fregean conception of content. FREGE held that linguistic expressions
have sense as well as reference, and the same might be suggested about
concepts. Each concept expresses a condition of reference (a sense) and
what it refers to is whatever satisfies that condition; and this condition is
not dependent on external features of the thinker's situation and is not
otherwise sensitive to contextual factors. If concepts are Fregean in this
way, then any two thinkers entertaining thoughts with the same conceptual
composition are, regardless of their external circumstances, thinking
thoughts with the same truth conditions. This rules out the possibility that,
because of sensitivity to circumstances, one could be thinking something
true and the other something false.
One difficulty with this Fregean view is its inability to handle
thoughts that are about particular individuals. Thoughts such as
'That's a canary' seem to be essentially indexical, in that their truth
conditions are relative to their contexts of occurrence (see CONTENT,
INDEXICAL): different people, having qualitatively identical
experiences, could think thoughts of that form but be thinking of
different birds.
A similar problem for the Fregean picture is posed by recognitional
concepts: one might see a certain exotic insect and think, referring to
its type, for which one might have no name, 'That must be indigenous
to the Amazon'. One might later observe a similar specimen and
think, 'It must be another one of those', referring to the same type.
One would be mistaken if, no matter how much the second looks
like the first, it is actually an insect of a different type. Thus the
property of being of the type initially picked out is not a matter of
fitting a certain image or conception. Whether or not one's concept of
that type applies to the next specimen depends not on whether or it fits
one's conception but on whether it is in fact a thing of the same sort
as the one originally picked out. So it seems that the Fregean picture
does not apply to recognitional concepts.
2. Twin Earth thought experiments
A similar difficulty was revealed by Putnam's (1975) celebrated
'Twin Earth' thought experiments, which introduced the distinction
between wide and narrow content. Twin Earth is a place where
everything is just like it is here, except as otherwise specified. In
one scenario, two men, Art and Bart (Art's counterpart on Twin Earth),
each have thoughts that they express with the words, 'Water quenches
thirst'. However, on Twin Earth the clear liquid that fills the seas
and falls from the skies is composed not of H2O but of some other stuff
XYZ. It is 1750 and Art and Bart, like everyone else, are ignorant of
chemistry and could not, even if they had the opportunity, tell the
difference between H2O and XYZ. Nevetheless, Putnam contends, Art and
Bart use the word 'water' to express different concepts. If Art were to
classify a sample of XYZ as water, he would be wrong, for it would not
be a substance of the same kind as water. As for Bart, he does not take
XYZ to be water, for he does not have the concept water. So Art and
Bart, even though they are not different neurally, have different
concepts, with different conditions of correct application. Their
concepts are not determined solely by what is in their
heads.
Burge (1979) conducts another thought experiment designed to show
that differences in people's social environments can make for differences
in mental content. An arthritic patient called Al complains to his doctor,
'My arthritis has spread to my thigh'. Nothing in his acquisition of
the term 'arthritis' has kept him from supposing that this inflammatory
disease can occur in the bones as well as the joints. Meanwhile, Cal,
his Twin Earth counterpart, registers a similar complaint. There,
however, the term 'arthritis' is used to refer to an inflammatory
disease of either the joints or the bones. Cal's exposure to the term
'arthritis' is the same as Al's, but, given how it is used on Twin
Earth, he understands it correctly. Now, according to Burge, both
patients are correctly said, on their respective planets, to believe
that arthritis can occur in the bones, but, since Cal's belief is true
and Al's is false, what they believe is different. However, there is no
internal difference between them. Therefore, what they believe is
partly an external matter. Contents are not, and do not supervene upon,
what's in the head.
These thought experiments have met with considerable enthusiasm
but also with neglected criticism (see Unger 1984, Bach 1987, and Crane
(1991). For one thing, they are conducted selectively: varying their
details can yield contrary intuitions, e.g., that XYZ is a kind of water.
Also, even granting the correctness of the intuition, e.g., that XYZ is not
a kind of water, they leave it a mystery why the references of different
concepts should be determined in different ways. The reference of the
concept we express with 'water' depends on the nature (H2O) of the clear,
plentiful liquid around us, but this is not the situation with the concepts
we express with the terms 'earth', 'air', and 'fire', whose references are
chemically heterogeneous and are determined by the satisfaction of
certain phenomenological conditions. Putnam and his followers do not
explain why the fact that water is a chemical natural kind and earth, air,
and fire are not should make the concept water a different kind of concept
from the concepts earth, air and fire, with its reference determined in a
fundamentally different way, even back in 1750.
The arthritis argument depends essentially on the supposition that
one can have beliefs with contents one 'incompletely understands'. It
assumes, for example, that Al not only misunderstands the word
'arthritis' but operates with the concept arthritis rather than with
some broader concept (call it tharthritis) that he mistakenly associates
with the word. So, it might be objected, Al understands the term
'arthritis' in precisely the same way as Cal does, and has the very same
belief, namely that his tharthritis has spread to his thigh. Whatever
evidence there is that he also believes that his arthritis has spread to
his thigh is overridden by his idiosyncratic understanding of the term
'arthritis' (we are not tempted to say that he believes that he has
inflammation of the joints in his thigh).
In any case, we cannot assume that what 'that'-clauses capture is the
sort of content relevant to psychology, that is, to characterizing people's
perspectives and explaining their actions and inferences. As Loar (1988)
and Patterson (1990) have both argued, one can grant that the thought
experiments succeed in showing that the truth conditions of attitude
ascriptions are sensitive to aspects of the physical and social environment
without granting that 'that'-clauses capture psychological content (see
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS). After all, linguisticsemantics
is not psychology.
3. Two kinds of content?
Burge is satisfied that there is only one kind of content, the
externalist kind revealed by the thought experiments and specified by
'that'-clauses in attitude ascriptions, and that no other kind is needed
for psychology. Other philosophers, such as Loar (1988) and Block
(1986), accept the thought experiments but propose another kind of
content, narrow as opposed to wide, which captures the person's
subjective point of view and serves the purposes of psychological
explanation. Narrow contents capture what earthlings and their Twin
Earth counterparts have in common, and explanations that ignore narrow
contents miss crucial generalizations. If so, what is narrow content
and how is it connected to wide content?
Loar and Block take narrow content to be 'conceptual role', which
is defined in terms of a concept's inferential connections to other
concepts. The main challenge for this view is to find a non-arbitrary
way of constraining the relevant connections, so that each psychological
state can turn out to possess a determinate narrow content, and to
explain how this constrains its truth condition (see SEMANTICS,
CONCEPTUAL ROLE). Another conception of narrow content, originated by
White (1982) and championed by Fodor (1987), is that narrow content is a
function from context to wide content. One challenge for this approach is
to define the operative notion of context and to specify narrow contents
informatively, rather than by abstraction from wide contents. Also,
although the distinction between wide and narrow content acknowledges a
systematic discrepancy between ordinary attitude attributions and
scientific psychological explanation and is motivated by a respect for
both, one might wonder whether there really are two kinds of content or
merely one kind described in two different ways.
It is difficult to assess the competing views because none of them,
at the time of this writing, has been developed in any great detail. A
plausible if tentative assessment is that the distinction between wide
and narrow content is well-motivated but not well-formulated. It is
well-motivated since, in many cases, a thought's truth condition is not
wholly determined by what is in the head, and yet what is in the head
does determine, independently of environmental factors, the thinker's
perspective. Also, as Frege first recognized, wide content is too
coarse to distinguish distinct perspectives on the same state of affairs
or otherwise mark relevant differences in cognitive role. Realizing
this, opponents of narrow content have suggested syntactic form or
computational role as a surrogate for narrow content. However, this
suggestion cuts things too finely: it fails to reckon with the possibility
that mental representations of different forms or different computational
roles might nevertheless embody the same cognitive perspective.
References and further reading
* Bach, K. (1987) Thought and Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
ch. 13. (Challenges Putnam's and Burge's Twin Earth thought
experiments.)
* Block, N. (1986) 'Advertisement for a semantics for psychology', in P.
French et al., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 10,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; reprinted in Stich and
Warfield. (Surveys a wide variety of theories and defends a conceptual
role theory of narrow content.)
* Burge, T. (1979) 'Individualism and the mental', in P. French et al.,
eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. (Employs a variety of Twin Earth thought experiments to
argue that mental contents are to a degree socially constituted.)
* Crane, T. (1991) 'All the difference in the world', Philosophical Quarterly
41: 1-25. (Challenges Putnam's and Burge's Twin Earth thought
experiments.)
* Fodor, J. (1987) Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (Explores White's idea
that narrow content as a function from context to wide
content.)
Fodor, J. (1994) The Elm and the Expert, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
(Argues that wide content is the only notion of content needed for the
purposes of psychological explanation.)
* Loar, B. (1988) 'Social content and psychological content' and 'Reply
to Bilgrami', in R. Grimm and P. Merrill, eds., Contents of Thoughts,
Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (Argues, contrary to Burge, that
psychological content is not in general what is captured by oblique
'that'-clauses)
Loewer, B. and G. Rey, eds. (1991) Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His
Critics, Oxford: Blackwell. (Articles, with replies by Fodor, addressing
main issues in the theory of content.)
* Patterson, S. (1990) 'The explanatory role of belief ascriptions',
Philosophical Studies 59: 313-332. (Argues that the orthodox
interpretation of Burge's Twin Earth thought experiments does not do
justice to the ways in which intentional states are individuated in
commonsense psychology.)
* Putnam, H. (1975) 'The meaning of "meaning",' in K. Gunderson, ed.,
Language, Mind, and Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. (Devises Twin Earth thought experiments to argue that meanings
cannot both determine reference and be 'in the head'.)
Stich, S. and T. Warfield, eds. (1994) Mental Representation: A Reader,
Oxford: Blackwell. (Contains important articles on major
theories of content.)
* Unger, P. (1984) Philosophical Relativity, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ch. 5. (Challenges the Twin Earth thought experiments
by showing how varying their details yields conflicting
intuitions.)
Wallace, J. and H. E. Mason (1990) 'Some thought experiments about
mind and meaning', in C. A. Anderson and J. Owens, eds., Propositional
Attitudes: The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind, Stanford:
Center for the Study of Language and Information. (Argues that ordinary
language provides much richer and subtler ways of attributing mental
contents than is allowed by the orthodox interpretation of Burge's Twin
Earth thought experiments.)
* White, S. (1982). 'Partial character and the language of thought',
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63: 347-365. (Proposes a conception of
narrow content as a function from context to wide content.)