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Sarah Sawyer, Narrow Content, by Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne, Mind, Volume 128, Issue 511, July 2019, Pages 976–984, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzy068
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Bo believes that snow is white; Hilary hopes that the plane will land safely; Frankie fears that winter has come too soon. Such sentences attribute thoughts to thinkers. The content of the thoughts attributed are specified by the relevant ‘that’-clauses: that snow is white; that the plane will land safely; that winter has come too soon. The central question with which Juhani Yli-Vakkuri and John Hawthorne are concerned in their recent book Narrow Content is whether the contents of a subject’s thoughts are fully determined by properties ‘internal’ to her, or whether they depend in part on ‘what is going on in the outside world’ (p. 3). According to the former, internalist option, content is narrow; according to the latter, externalist option, content is broad. Narrow Content provides a sustained argument against narrow content, and hence in favour of externalism. Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne do not argue that there are no narrow content assignments to thoughts (there are, they say, infinitely many of them); they argue that there are no theoretically significant narrow content assignments. If true, this would undermine the rationale for advocating narrow content of any kind.