A Slim Book about Narrow Content

by Gabriel M.A. Segal

A good understanding of the nature of a property requires knowing whether that property is relational or intrinsic. Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties -- specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states -- are relational or intrinsic. He claims that content supervenes on microstructure, that is, if two beings are identical with respect to their microstructural properties, then they must be identical with respect to their cognitive contents. Segal's thesis, a version of internalism, is that being in a state with a specific cognitive content does not essentially involve standing in any real relation to anything external. He uses the fact that content locally supervenes on microstructure to argue for the intrinsicness of content. Cognitive content is fully determined by intrinsic, microstructural duplicate a subject in respect to those properties and you duplicate their cognitive contents. The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters. The first two argue against the two leading externalist theories. Chapter 3 rejects popular theories that endorse two kinds of "narrow" content, which is locally supervenient, and "broad" content, which is not. Chapter 4 defends a radical alternative version of internalism, arguing that narrow content is a variety of ordinary representation, that is, that narrow content is all there is to content. In defending internalism, Segal does not claim to defend a general philosophical theory of content. At this stage, he suggests, it should suffice to cast reasonable doubt on externalism, to motivate internalism, and to provide reasons to believe that good psychology is, or could be, internalist.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics

135 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2000

Reviews

[saml · Rating 3 out of 5]

yep! it's A Slim Book about Narrow Content. being an enemy of narrow content, and just about anything else narrow, i thought i'd read this to remediate my bias a tad. i was not impressed by the bad physics, and have no idea whether the psychology is any good. but generally i found this neatly responsive to the traditional arguments for externalism in a pleasing and concise manner. my general fear is that we need to spend some time pinning down words like "intrinsic", "content" and "concept" just to make sure we aren't confused. but maybe this pinning down has been done, and i'm just ignorant