Abstract

Mental states in psychology Many of our thoughts, emotions and motivations have intentional content: they are ‘about’ something. In this paper I present my VENI research project, which starts from the observation that the everyday practice of empirical psychological research is built on the idea that mental states have content. However, empirical psychology lacks a clear view on how mental content should be understood and how mental states could be causally efficacious in virtue of their content. I focus on mental states that play a role in psychiatric symptomatology, and develop an interpretivist answer to these questions. I also offer some suggestions showing how an interpretivist notion of mental content could be used in empirical research on psychiatric symptoms.