Externalism Revisited: Is There Such a Thing as Narrow Content? I. How to Derive the Three Views about Content from Twin Earth?

There are presently, or so it seems to me, three main views about the individuation of the content of intentional mental states. First, there is the no content view: the view that the content (of an intentional mental state) is an ordinary folk pre-scientific concept which can play no role in a respectable mature scientific psychology. Second there is a dualist (or bifurcationist) view of content which posits a distinction between narrow and broad content. Although it acknowledges the (obvious) existence of broad content and because it assumes the existence and legitimacy of narrow content, dualism is consistent with an individualist view of content. Third, there is anti-individualism, Which is a monist view about the individuation of the content of intentional mental states such as thoughts, beliefs and other propositional attitudes, i.e. states which we ordinarily or commonsensically describe or ascribe to a person by means of a complex sentence with a psychological verb (describing the person's attitude) prefixed by a singular term referring to the person and followed by an embedded clause (or "that"-clause) expressing the content of the person's attitude. Unlike dualism, anti-individualism assumes that there is no room for a narrow individuation of the content of an individual's intentional mental states since it cannot ever be individuated independently from the individual's (physical or social) environment. According to anti-individualism, a person's brain, his or her brain states and (probably) his or her "subdoxastic" cognitive states are located within the person's cranial box. 1 Many if not all of the person's thoughts and intentional mental states however would be spread unto the person's physical and social environment on which they depend for their individuation. According to anti-individualism, a person's physical and social environment is inherently part of the content of his or her thoughts and other intentional mental states. So if anti-individualism is 144 PIERRE JACOB right, then what Fodor (1980, p. 229) refers to as "the long tradition, including both Rationalists and Empiricists, which takes it as axiomatic that one's experience (and a forfiori, one's beliefs) might have been just as they are even if the world had been quite different from the way it is" is just wrong. There are at least two versions of, or two main roads leading to, anti-individualism depending on whether one focuses upon the contribution of particular ("physical") objects located in a person's ("physical") environment to the content of his or her …