MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

sidering. This approach, however, is not fully satisfactory.
First, it underestimates the theoretical significance of narrow
content by making its ascription parasitic on the
ascription of broad content. Second, it provides only an
indirect answer to the question what the subject believes,
where the question concerns narrow belief. Third, narrow
contents, so defined, do not lend themselves easily to a
characterization of the logical or epistemic relations
among a subject’s beliefs, nor to an analysis of the relations
in virtue of which they figure in practical reasoning
or decision-making.
An alternative approach to narrow content takes its cue
from the fact that the truth conditions of a belief or utterance
are often represented as the set of possible worlds at
which that belief or utterance is true. As we have seen, the
causal theorist’s notion of truth and truth conditions leads
directly to broad content. However, we can represent the
narrow contents of the subject’s beliefs as the set of
worlds where those beliefs are accurate or veridical and
then define these in a way that is independent of truth.
One suggestion is that there is a conceptual connection
between possible worlds at which one’s beliefs are accurate
and worlds at which one’s actions are optimal (and
nonaccidentally so), given one’s desires and one’s available
alternatives. The intuition is that if one performs an
action that from one’s own point of view is the best action
under the circumstances (it is not weak willed, etc.), then
it could only fail to be optimal if some of one’s beliefs
were inaccurate (White 1991).
See also POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS; PROPOSITIONAL
ATTITUDES; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Stephen L. White
References
Bilgrami, A. (1992). Belief and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies
in Philosophy, vol 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Field, H. (1977). Logic, meaning, and conceptual role. Journal of
Philosophy 74: 379–409.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its
Semantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1952). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harman, G. (1982). Conceptual role semantics. Notre Dame Journal
of Formal Logic 23: 242–256.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1977). Procedural semantics. Cognition 5:
189–214.
Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Loar, B. (1982). Conceptual role and truth conditions. Notre Dame
Journal of Formal Logic 23: 272–283.
Miller, G. A., and P. N. Johnson-Laird. (1976). Language and Perception.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nativism 583
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In H. Putnam, Ed.,
Mind, Language and Reality. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Schiffer, S. (1981). Truth and the theory of content. In H. Parret
and J. Bouveresse, Eds., Meaning and Understanding. New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
Stampe, D. W. (1977). Toward a causal theory of linguistic representation.
In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Stich, S. (1978). Autonomous psychology and the belief-desire
thesis. Monist 61: 573–591.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
White, S. L. (1982). Partial character and the language of thought.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63: 347–365. Reprinted in S. L.
White, The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT
Press.
White, S. L. (1991). Narrow content and narrow interpretation. In
S. L. White, Ed., The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT
Press.
Wilson, R. A. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds:
Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Further Readings
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T.
Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy,
vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Field, H. (1978). Mental representation. Erkenntnis 13: 9–61.
Fodor, J. A. (1978). Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother.
Cognition 6: 229–247.
Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3: 63–73. Reprinted in J. A. Fodor, Representations.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1978). What’s wrong with grandma’s guide to
procedural semantics: A reply to Jerry Fodor. Cognition 6:
241–261.
Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H.
Wettstein, Eds., Themes from Kaplan. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1989). On what's in the head. In J. Tomberlin, Ed.,
Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 3, Philosophy of Mind and
Action Theory. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Woodfield, A., Ed. (1982). Thought and Content. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Nativism
Nativism is often understood as the view that a significant
body of knowledge is “built in” to an organism, or at least
innately predetermined. This characterization, however, fails
to capture contemporary nativism as well as being inadequate
for many older views (see NATIVISM, HISTORY OF).
Few nativists argue today for the full predetermination of
specific concepts, ideas, or cognitive structures such as a language’s
grammar; and few empiricists fail to argue for certain
kinds of information processing, such as back
propagation (see SUPERVISED LEARNING), as being built in.
Every party to current debates about nativism in fact shares
the view that there is something special and intrinsic, that is