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Anandi Hattiangadi, In Defence of Narrow Content, Analysis, Volume 79, Issue 3, July 2019, Pages 539–550, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anz029
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Extract
1. Introduction
Narrow Content is the latest contribution to the longstanding debate between internalists and externalists about mental content.1 Internalism is traditionally construed as the thesis that our thoughts have a kind of content that is narrow – that supervenes on intrinsic properties of an agent. Externalism is traditionally construed as the thesis that all of our thought content is wide – that supervenes in part on relations between an individual and her external physical or social environment.2Narrow Content presents a sustained attack on internalism. Its central thesis is that there is no narrow content-assignment that is theoretically interesting.
The book has much to recommend it. It brings an admirable precision to the debate, articulating a rigorous definition of a notion of narrow content in the first chapter, and some important constraints on that notion in the first and second. In the second chapter, the authors introduce the Mirror Man case beautifully illustrated on the book’s cover, and present the ‘parameter proliferation argument’ based on it, which poses a powerful challenge to some of the most influential forms of internalism. The remaining chapters build on the first two, with Mirror Man reappearing repeatedly throughout the book. The third and fourth chapters contain a wealth of subtle and powerful arguments to the effect that no narrow content-assignment plays any of the interesting theoretical roles narrow content has been said to have, such as providing a supervenience base for rationality, explaining privileged access, explaining action, explaining phenomenal properties, or bearing a special relation to phenomenal intentionality.3 The fifth and sixth chapters explore options for responding to the authors’ objections. The book will no doubt be of interest to anyone closely involved in this debate.
