The Components of Content

Abstract

This paper addresses some tricky issues in the area where the philosophy of mind meets the philosophy of language. In it I develop a two-dimensional account of the contents of thought, decomposing content into notional and relational content, both of which are propositional and truth-conditional. Notional content is generally internal to a cognitive system, and governs rational relations between thoughts, so it can play the role of "narrow" or "cognitive" content. I apply this framework to a number of puzzles (Frege's puzzle, Kripke's puzzle, the problem of the essential indexical, the mode-of-presentation problem, etc.) in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language