A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. That is, a person could be in just those states, their perspective could be just the same, and these mental states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow.
Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role.
Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected. Motivating the distinction 2. Twin Earth thought experiments 3. But this fact seems to produce a dilemma. On the one hand, representational states are what they are in virtue of how they represent things to be.