Topic:  Jackson and Pettit’s “Some Content is Narrow”

*Some ways of defending narrow content:

    1) Simply come up with an example of a belief attribution that holds of all, and only, physical duplicates (“from the skin in”).
    2) Argue that only narrow content is up for the causal-explanatory job that content needs to play in psychology.
    3) Jackson and Pettit take neither of these routes.  Instead:  “We argue that certain points about the way we folk predict human
    behaviour, about the nature of our solution to the problem of predicting human behaviour, commits us to the existence of
    narrow, folk, truth-evaluable content.” (p. 260)

1.

The folk problem of predicting behavior:  Predicting behavior only on the basis of what is externally observable. (p. 261)

    --But what kind of externally observable evidence do we use to make these predictions?  J&P note the criticisms against the
    idea that “raw behavior, the physical movements our bodies make described as such, rather than, for instance, the movements
    described in terms of the language of intentionally characterized action” serve as our evidential base. (p. 262)  J&P do not think
    that the evidential base for folk psychology is intentionally described (as opposed to raw) behavior.  Why?  “We can put the
    central point this way:  to turn to intentional descriptions of behaviour is in effect to ‘go internal’.  But we cannot go internal to
    find the patterns and generalizations we folk need to get started.” (p. 263)
    [Re-read the comparison’s to Robinson Crusoe and fossil experts, on the bottom of p. 263]

    --The patterns of behavior—e.g., behavior that all has the effect of removing the agent from the wind—can be discerned
    without describing the behavior in intentional terms.  The behaviors are classified by the effects they have. (p. 264)

    --These data are then coupled with the intentional stance:  “people behave in such a way that had their beliefs been true, then
    their desires would have been satisfied.” (p. 266)  J&P take folk psychology to be immune from elimination, given its real world
    successes.

    --J&P think of folk psychology in terms of possibilities.  Our beliefs and desires mark off classes of possibilities.  Further:
    “The way belief-desire psychology captures the projectable patterns in raw behaviour can now be described in terms of
    possibilities, as follows.  Among the various possible ways that a subject’s body might move at a time, a subject tends to move
    in such a way that had any one of the possibilities associated with her beliefs been the way things actually were, then one of the
    ways associated with her desires would have been actual.  Had any one of the believed possibilities been actual, one of the
    desired possibilities would have been actual.  We predict behaviour in circumstances by projecting these patterns.” (p. 267)
    They also note that these beliefs and desires should be thought of as big conjunctions, given points about the holism of the
    mental.

2.

This section uses the section 1 picture to answer three questions:

1.  How does truth-conditional content follow?

    --For J&P, the contents of our beliefs and desires are the sets of possibilities associated with these beliefs and desires.  “But
    content in terms of sets of possibilities is automatically truth-evaluable.  It comes out true precisely if the content set of
    possibilities contains the way things actually are.” (p. 269)

2.  In what sense is this content a folk notion?

    1. “It is common currency to explain how you would like things to be in terms of rankings of the various possibilities, and how
    you take things to be in terms of how likely various possibilities are.” (p. 270)
    2. These patterns of possibilities can be detected by the folk.

3.  Where’s the narrow content?

    --J&P begin with Burge’s comments about how the psychologist cannot abstract away from considerations about one’s natural
    and social environments.  This is supposed to suggest a need for wide content.  But J&P note that the folk psychological
    predictions, even as they describe them, obviously do not abstract away from “relations to the natural and social worlds.” (p.
    271)

    --J&P suggest that we separate two anti-individualistic theses:
 
        1. “(S)ome given central psychological property cannot be explained individualistically.”
        2. “(T)he property does not supervene on how the subject is from the skin in:  it is, that is, not necessarily shared by
        doppelgangers.” (p. 271)

        --J&P give an analogy to water-solubility.  Like water-solubility, they hold that predictive content is never individualistic in the
        first sense, but sometimes is individualistic in the second sense.

            [This distinction between types of anti-individualism corresponds to two types of narrow content (individualism):
            inter-world narrow and intra-world narrow. (p. 272)]

        --J&P really are opposing Burge’s position because:
        “And arguments like these [i.e., like Burge’s] are arguments that content can vary without supposing any change in the laws
        of nature, or in general any change that is ‘big’ enough to require supposing a change in possible world.  They are, therefore,
        arguments that folk, truth-conditional content cannot be intra-world narrow.” (p. 273)

    --Note the “two facts”, stated in the middle of p. 273, that drive their argument for narrow content.

        1. Folk psychological explanations of behavior are robust.

        We are committed to holding that these explanations might be improved by a sophisticated lower-level science, but will not be
        replaced by one. (p. 274)

        An argument for narrow content, it seems, can be given immediately—see the only full paragraph on p. 275.

        Important passage:  “The argument does not turn on the fact that doppelgangers in fact behave in the same way—something
        which is only true at the level of raw movement so described—it turns on the fact that they would in every situation behave
        in the same way, and that is true both in the sense that their raw movements are the same and in the sense that the way
        these raw movements would affect their environmental orientations is exactly the same.” (pp. 275-276)

        2.  But replicas can differ in their historical properties, and historical properties can play a role in explaining behavior.  So,
        J&P must also argue that whenever there is a belief-desire explanation using historical properties, there is also a belief-desire
       explanation which does not use such properties. (pp. 276-277)  Fortunately, they claim, the local nature of causation
       guarantees this.

3.

Two objections:

1. J&P’s “content” is predictive, but not explanatory.  Real content must be explanatory.
2. The talk of possibilities associated with beliefs and desires falls prey to the familiar objections against Lewis-Stalnaker semantics.