9.2.3—
Broad Content, Narrow Content, Phenomenological Content

Significantly, the problem of accounting for "content" shapes up differently depending on which tradition you are starting from. In recent years, analytic philosophy has given a great deal of discussion to "broad" ver-

sus "narrow" content. But the natural construal of "content" from the phenomenological standpoint does not exactly map onto either of these. There the natural distinction is between what we might call the "intentional character" of mental states (the features that are invariant over all possible assumptions about extramental reality) and "veridicality" (hooking up to the world in a felicitous way). The notion of "content" that is a part of intentional character is neither wide nor narrow content exactly.

The basic idea behind the distinction between broad and narrow content is that at least some words and concepts depend for their semantics upon things outside of the mind. Writers like Kripke (1971) and Putnam (1975) have argued, for example, that it is part of the semantics of our notion of "water" (and likewise the word 'water') that it refer to H₂ O, and that it did so even prior to the discovery that water was H₂ O. Indeed, on this view, "water" would have referred to H₂ O even if we all believed that water was of some other molecular type. If there were beings on Twin Earth who were phenomenologically, functionally, and physically identical to us but were exposed to some other compound XYZ in the same contexts we are exposed to water, their concept "water" would mean not H₂ O but XYZ. (Of course, to make this work, you have to bracket the problems that arise from using a substance that comprises most of our body weight for the example. I suggest substituting another kind of substance if this distracts you.) A second kind of argument is raised by Burge (1979, 1986), who claims that many words, such as 'arthritis', are often used by people who do not know their full sense. According to Burge, we may use such words felicitously even without knowing their sense because we are tied into a social-linguistic network with experts who do know the sense of the words: when I say 'arthritis', I intend to refer to whatever condition it is that the experts refer to when they employ the word. "Broad" content—or perhaps the broad notion of content—is thus something that depends on mind-world relations. This kind of "externalist" view comes in two varieties: the "ecological" kind, which ties semantics to the thinker's environment through relations like causation, adaptation, learning, and selection, and the "social" kind, which embeds semantics within a social, and particularly a linguistic framework. "Narrow" content (or the narrow notion of content), by contrast, is often characterized as what is "in the head." It is often said that molecular (or functional) duplicates (quaintly called doppelgängers ) would necessarily share narrow content, though they might differ with respect to broad content due to being thrust into different social and natural environments.

From the phenomenological starting point, however, the natural distinction to make is not the distinction between broad and narrow content, but between those properties that are contained within the experience itself, regardless of the relation of the experience to extramental reality, and those properties that depend upon extramental reality as well. Thus Husserl invites the reader to perform an epoché or "bracketing" of everything that is dependent upon extramental reality in order to study intentional states as they are in their own right. And Chisholm and others resort to turns of phrase like "seeming to see a tree" or "being appeared-to-treewise" to distinguish the sense of verbs like 'see' that merely report the character of the experience from those that imply a kind of success as well. I shall mark this distinction by speaking of the notion of intentionality that implies a correspondence with extramental reality as veridical intentionality . The aspect of intentionality that does not vary with assumptions about extramental reality I shall call the intentional character of the mental.^[4] What I mean by this latter expression are those aspects of an intentional state that do not vary with variations in extramental reality. And there are two kinds of invariants here: invariants in modality and invariants in content .

Let us consider an example of an intentional state. Suppose, for example, that I experience a perceptual gestalt of a unicorn on my front lawn. That is, I have an intentional state with the intentional modality VISUAL PRESENTATION and the content [unicorn on my front lawn]. Now there are certain things that one can say about such a mental state that do not depend upon issues such as whether there really is a unicorn there (or anywhere) or what causes me to have the experience that I have. Regardless of whether there is a unicorn there (or anywhere), it remains the case (a ) that my experience has the intentional modality of VISUAL PRESENTATION (it appears to me as though there is a unicorn on my lawn), and (b ) that my experience has the content of presenting a beast of a certain form and with certain associations (it appears to me as though there is a unicorn —rather than a cat or a rock—and it appears as though it is on my lawn ). Each of these aspects of my experience has a certain phenomenology to it. There is a "what-it's-like" to having a perceptual gestalt, and it is different from what it is like to have a recollection, however vivid, or to have a desire accompanied by imagery, and so forth. Perhaps there are pathologies in which such distinctions are lost, and in some cases we may not differentiate adequately between modalities (e.g., between different strengths of conviction of belief or between imagination and perception); but in ordinary cases, we can quite simply tell

what intentional modality is at work. Imagine how much more complicated life would be if we were systematically unable to distinguish experiences that were perceptual gestalts from those that were memories!

There is likewise a "what-it's-like" for having an experience with the content [unicorn on my front lawn], and it is very different from what it is like to be presented with an experience having the content [cat on my front lawn]. To determine whether I am having a gestalt of a cat or a unicorn, I do not have to consider my behavioral dispositions or the functional relations of my state of mind to other states of mind, any more than I have to do so to identify the feeling of pain as pain.^[5] There is simply a difference in what different kinds of intentional states are like. So occurrent states have an intentional character that arguably dispositional beliefs do not have, and the notion of "content" that emerges from this perspective—which we may call phenomenological content —is a proper part of intentional character, which also involves an intentional modality as well.

It should be clear that phenomenological content is not equivalent to broad content, since the former partitions the mental in a way that is insensitive to relations to extramental reality while the latter depends essentially upon such relations.^[6] The relationship between phenomenological content and narrow content is more difficult. Narrow content is sometimes associated with the notion of "methodological solipsism" (Fodor 1980), which seems to imply slicing the intentional pie according to things that are invariant for the thinker qua thinker. (It seems hard to see how a third -person functionalist approach could merit the name of "solipsism"!) This would seem to imply in turn that narrow content is just phenomenological content. But narrow content has also become associated with characterization in terms of what is (necessarily) shared by physical or functional doppelgängers, and that seems to be different from phenomenological content. After all, it seems epistemically possible both that I do have a body and that I do not (the Cartesian demon scenario). Similarly it seems conceivable, hence logically possible, that there be a being that is my phenomenological doppelgänger but not my physical or functional doppelgänger, and vice versa. In the absence of any way of deriving a particular phenomenology from a particular physical or functional description (or vice versa), it seems to me we should assume that these notions diverge—perhaps in real cases, but certainly in counterfactual ones. I suspect and hope that talk of narrow content is really a way of getting at phenomenological content, with incorrect assumptions being made about the necessity of relationships between the

two. But for purposes of clarity, I shall treat the notion of narrow content here as though it were defined in terms of what physical or functional duplicates would necessarily share in common.