Tracking Belief

Problems in attributing beliefs to animals stem from the fact that the contents (of beliefs and desires) used in such attribution are anchored to humans. This chapter spells out a de-anchoring strategy. The result of this is that it can be appropriate to explain the behavior of an animal using contents that only humans can entertain as long as our contents track theirs. That is: (a) the truth of a belief with our content guarantees the truth of their belief, and (b) our belief and theirs share narrow content. This is important not just in the case of animals. There are good reasons for thinking that tracking begins at home. There are no stable belief contents shared by different humans or even attaching to a single human through time. Content must be de-anchored in order to make sense of ourselves as well as other animals.

Content: wide and narrow

Debates about wide and narrow content concern the representational contents of psychological states such as beliefs and desires. In the mid-twentieth century, it became common among philosophers to think of the primary kind of content of psychological states as being the things in the world that the states refer to, or as being relations to those things. This kind of referential or extensional content is essentially relational, requiring the subject to stand in some relation to an existing thing outside their skin. Hence the moniker "wide content." This was a radical departure from historically more common views according to which the primary content of psychological states does not depend on the subject standing in some relation to an existing thing outside their skin. That is, traditionally it has been more common to think of psychological content as being "narrow" rather than wide. Narrow content is content that is not wide. The question of whether verbal or psychological content is sometimes or always wide, narrow, or both is hotly debated among philosophers. As noted above, the middle of the twentieth century saw the ascension of wide theories of content, but by the turn of the millennium there was a resurgence of the narrow theory, particularly among those who hoped to explain the phenomena of consciousness in terms of psychological content. For there is a strong tendency to think that what a subject’s conscious experiences are like for her does not depend on distal facts about the world she inhabits.

Content: wide and narrow

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 and those 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 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.