In Deference to Reference

This dissertation consists in three separate papers. The topic of Iln Deference to Refernnts' is the semantic structure of belief reports of the form 'A believes that pl. I argue that no existing theory of these sentences satisfactorily accounts for anaphoric relations among expressions inside and outside of the embedded complement sentences. I propose a new account of belief reports, which assigns to embedded expressions their normal semantic values, but which also exploits Frege's idea of using senses to explain the apparent failures of extensionality in the reports. In 'Who's Afraid of Narrow Minds?' I defend the thesis that the propositional attitudes ascribed by folk psychology possess a level of content ('narrow content') that is independent of anything outside the subject. I examine various objections to that conclusion, and show that they fail. In ISeeing What is not Therel I examine the nature of the representational contents attributed to perceptual states by the computational theory of vision. I discuss Tyler Burge's claim that such contents are not narrow, but depend essentially on aspects of the external environment. I show that the claim is false, and that the explanatory power of the theory of vision depends upon its employment of a notion of narrow content.