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Narrow Content
Narrow Content
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
and John Hawthorne
1
3
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1. What is narrow content? 18
2. Truth-conditionality 63
3. Narrow content and ur-content 97
4. Rationality and narrow content 121
5. Quasi-internalism 149
6. Relational narrowness 167
References 201
Index of Names 209
General Index 211
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank David Chalmers, Cian Dorr, Julien Dutant, Jeremy
Goodman, Ofra Magidor, Jeff Speaks, and three readers for Oxford University
Press for detailed written comments on various drafts of the manuscript, as well
as Jason Turner and Timothy Williamson, who provided detailed written com-
ments on early versions of the material in chapters 2, 3, and 4. For further helpful
discussions we are also grateful to Daniel Altshuler, Frank Arntzenius, Andrew
Bacon, George Bealer, Ben Caplan, Christina Dietz, Katalin Farkas, Kit Fine,
Peter Fritz, Benj Hellie, Torfinn Huvenes, Sandra Lapointe, Maria Lasonen-
Aarnio, Jon Litland, Clayton Littlejohn, Beau Madison Mount, Jessica Pepp,
Robert Stalnaker, Panu Raatikainen, Daniel Rothschild, Jeff Sanford Russell,
Gabriel Sandu, Margot Strohminger, Gabriel Uzquiano, Sara Kasin Vikesdal,
Ralph Wedgwood, Jessica Wilson, and audiences at the University of Oxford,
the University of Toronto, University College London, King’s College London,
the University of Guelph, McMaster University, the University of Oslo, Umeå
University, the University of Cologne, the University of Helsinki, the University
of Tampere, Boğaziçi University, the University of Tartu, the University of Leeds,
the University of Bristol, and the students in Juhani Yli-Vakkuri’s graduate
seminar at the University of Oslo in Fall 2013. We would also like to thank the
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo for funding a
workshop on the topic of this book, and the Faculty of Humanities at the
University of Oslo for a grant that funded an extended visit by Juhani
Yli-Vakkuri to Oxford. Finally, we would like to thank Peter Momtchiloff for
his helpful advice and encouragement.
Introduction
A central topic in the philosophy of mind is the category of so-called intentional

states.¹ Paradigms include thoughts, beliefs, and hopes.² Natural language pro-
vides us with a variety of ways of talking about intentional states. A particular
intentional state might be variously described as a ‘belief ’, as a ‘true belief ’, as
a ‘view on the matter of whether snow is white’, as a ‘belief about snow’, or as a
‘belief that snow is white’. At least on the face of it, using the last construction—or
a close variant, such as ‘believing that snow is white’—to describe the state is apt to
be more informative than using any of the others. It is not surprising, then, that
philosophers of mind have tended to favour the ‘that’-clause-involving construc-
tions for describing intentional states, and for the most part we will follow suit.
We will use the term ‘thought’ for all intentional states that are aptly described by
‘that’-clauses.³
When one learns even some introductory philosophy of mind, one learns to
theorize about the intentional states that may be so described using a certain
standard vocabulary. One learns to describe hopes, beliefs, etc., as each having a
‘content’, and one learns to take the ‘that’-clause as a canonical way of specifying
that content. Thus, one takes ‘that snow is white’ in ‘John’s belief that snow is
white’ to be a canonical way of specifying the content of John’s belief—that
content being that snow is white.
A sentence like ‘He hopes that he will get the job’ can be offered as an answer to
such questions as ‘What is it that he hopes for?’ or ‘What is the thing that he most
hopes for?’ Not surprisingly, then, philosophers are apt to speak of contents as
¹ We are not thinking here of states as characteristics that may be shared between agents, but
rather as episodes, events, processes, and dispositions that are particular to a single agent. See our
discussion of thoughts in §1.1 for further discussion.
² Obviously it would be very tendentious to claim that all mental states are intentional. The state
of being depressed and the state of being in pain are mental states that are not, on the face of it,
intentional.
³ Perhaps there are some intentional states for which the ‘that’-clause constructions are not apt.
We will not discuss them in this book.
 NARROW CONTENT
things that are believed, hoped for, etc. It is also natural to think that there are
things that no one will ever believe, hope for, etc., or perhaps even entertain, but
that could have been believed, hoped for, etc., or entertained. These things, too,
are contents. And perhaps there are things of the same kind that, for one reason
or another, cannot be believed, hoped for, etc., by anyone or anything. (Perhaps
some things of that kind are too elusive to be even entertained by any possible
mind; perhaps, in other cases, there are purely logical obstacles to the content
being believed, hoped for, etc.⁴) Thus it is natural to think that the contents of
actual thoughts are a subclass of a larger natural class of items—the contents—
many of which will never be the contents of any actual thoughts, and some of
which perhaps even cannot be the contents of any thoughts (see note 4).
The ‘that’-clauses that we use to specify the contents of thoughts can also be
used to raise questions about what is true. Just as we can ask ‘Does he believe that
snow is white?’ we can also ask ‘Is it true that snow is white?’ and ‘Is what he
believes—namely that snow is white—true?’ Not surprisingly, then, it is standard
for philosophers to think of the contents of thoughts as evaluable for truth and
falsity. According to fairly standard terminology, contents that are evaluable for
truth and falsity are called ‘propositions’, and philosophers tend to theorize about
⁴ At least some contents demonstrably cannot be known, even though they are capable of being
true. For example, arguably, it is impossible for the content specified by ‘that John is suave but no
one knows that John is suave’ to be known. For suppose someone knows it; then someone knows
that: John is suave but no one knows that John is suave. Then that person both knows that John is
suave and knows that no one knows that John is suave. Since whatever one knows is true, it follows
that no one knows that John is suave—even though the person in question knows that John is suave.
Since a contradiction follows from the supposition that the content in question is known, it is
impossible for it to be known. This is a putative example of a purely logical obstacle to knowledge of
a certain content. The form of argument used here was discovered by Alonzo Church and reported
in Fitch (1963), and it has been much discussed in recent epistemology: see Williamson (2000: §12)
for discussion and citations. (The argument makes use of the principle, which some find question-
able, that knowledge distributes over conjunction in the sense that whenever one knows that [p and q]
one knows that p and one knows that q. Examples of unknowable but possibly true contents can be
obtained without relying on that principle, however: e.g., even though it is possible that no one knows
anything, it is impossible for anyone to know that no one knows anything.)
Another class of examples of purely logical obstacles not only to knowledge but also to belief,
hope, etc., was discovered by Prior (1961): see Bacon et al. (2017) for discussion.
None of these are examples of contents that cannot be the content of any intentional state. There
is, however, a reason to think that there are contents that could not be the contents of any belief,
hope, etc. The reason is that there are not enough possible beliefs, hopes, etc., to have all of the
contents—this is so, at least, if we think of contents (as we prefer to do) as second-order entities, i.e.,
as properties rather than objects (where properties are not to be thought of as a species of object).
The reasoning we have in mind begins with the observation, based on Cantorian reasoning, that
there are more sub-pluralities of the possible thoughts than there are possible thoughts. It then
appeals to further plausible premises to argue there are at least as many contents as there are sub-
pluralities of the possible thoughts. But we will not pursue these issues here. (For discussion of the
relevant Cantorian reasoning for pluralities, see Hawthorne and Russell (forthcoming).)
INTRODUCTION 
thoughts in a way that presumes that they have as their contents propositions that
are either true or false. (For this reason, the things we are calling ‘thoughts’ are also
sometimes called ‘propositional attitudes’.) Just as a ‘that’-clause is made up of
various sub-sentential components, it is at least rather natural to think of the
propositions that are the contents of thoughts as being somehow built up from
sub-propositional contents corresponding to the sub-sentential components of a
‘that’-clause. So, for example, if someone believes that Edinburgh will remain in the
European Union, it is natural to think of the content of the person’s belief as
somehow involving sub-propositional contents corresponding to ‘Edinburgh’,
‘will remain in the European Union’, ‘the European Union’, and so on.
Even without making this ideology much more precise, it is easy enough to
introduce the internalist/externalist debate that shapes and informs this book.
There is an intuitive contrast between what is going on inside any given agent and
what is going on outside the agent (where some events or processes perhaps
involve a combination of both). For example, Juhani’s indigestion occurs on his
inside; the cooking of his tournedos Rossini occurs on his outside (and perhaps,
when Juhani eats a tournedos Rossini, the eating occurs partly on his inside and
partly on his outside). Assuming we have a grip on some such distinction, we can
raise the question of whether the contents of some or all thoughts are fully
determined by what goes on inside the agent whose thoughts they are or whether
the contents of some or all thoughts at least partly depend on what goes on
outside the agent. (The relevant notion of dependence will be made precise in
§1.3, but for now it will suffice to say that it is not a kind of causal dependence,
but rather a kind of metaphysical dependence.)
Note that it is already completely obvious that which object a given thought is
about is not fully determined by what goes on inside the agent of the thought.
For example, suppose Bill has two indiscriminable marbles and that he puts one
of them (Marble 1) in his pocket and the other (Marble 2) on the table, so that
Sally can see the latter but not the former. Sally will now have all sorts of
thoughts that are about Marble 2 but not about Marble 1. If Bill had instead
put Marble 2 on the table and Marble 1 in his pocket, Sally might have been
exactly the same on the inside even though her thoughts would have been about
Marble 1 instead of Marble 2. This kind of observation is far from new. The
point that which object one is thinking about partly depends on what is going
on in the outside world was fully appreciated by William of Ockham in the
thirteenth century:
One [angel] who intuitively sees an act of cognition of some singular [in another’s
mind] does not, nevertheless, intuitively see the singular thing itself . . . . For, even if
an angel were to intuitively see the act of cognition of some singular . . . nevertheless,
 NARROW CONTENT
he would not see that cognition [in the mind of the other] is of this singular. . . .
Indeed, even if there were only one singular thing near to the intellect [of the other]
still the angel could not evidently know that this cognition is of that singular . . .⁵
Ockham’s point, if it isn’t already clear, is that an angel who only had access to
the inside of your mind would not always be able to tell which external object a
particular act of cognition of yours is about. The point is epistemological, but it is
natural to construe Ockham as also thinking that, if the object of your cognition
were fully determined by what is going on inside you, then the angel would be
smart enough to know just how it is determined, and so would be in a position to
know what the object of cognition is.
The marble example involved two possible but not compossible situations. In
each situation Sally is the same on the inside but the objects that her intentional
states are about are different. This observation can be generalized using the
philosophers’ notion of extension. The paradigmatic use of that ideology is in
connection with sentences and their constituents: the extension of a sentence is
its truth value (either truth or falsehood), the extension of a singular term (such
as a proper name) is its referent, and the extension of a predicate that can
combine with one singular term to form a sentence (what is called a one-place
predicate) is the set of things that the predicate is true of.⁶ Thus, for example, the
extension of ‘London is hexagonal’ is falsehood, the extension of ‘London’ is
London, and the extension of ‘is hexagonal’ is the set of all and only the
hexagonal things. Insofar as we think of thoughts as built out of constituents
corresponding to sentences and their constituents, we can happily transfer the
ideology of extensions to thoughts and their constituents.⁷ The marble example
illustrated the fact that the thought constituent corresponding to ‘that’ in the
sentence ‘That is on the table’, as uttered by Sally, is such that its extension, at
⁵ Ockham, Reportatio, Scriptum in Librum Primum Sententiarum, quoted in, and translated by,
Brower-Toland (2007: 322–23).
⁶ These are just some examples. Any meaningful expression of a natural language can be thought
of as having an extension. For example, an n-place predicate (a predicate that, when applied to n
singular terms, forms a sentence) is standardly thought of as having a set of sequences of length n as
its extension, ‘and’ and ‘or’ are standardly thought of as having ordered pairs of truth values as their
extensions, and so on.
⁷ The notion of a thought constituent is not the same as that of a content constituent, just as the
notion of a sentence constituent is not the same as that of a content constituent. The easiest way of
carrying over the linguistic categories to thought is to assume that thought is conducted in a special
internal language, the ‘language of thought’. (This idea, too, originates in the writings of Ockham in the
thirteenth century: see Normore 2009. See Fodor 1975 for a more recent defence of it.) However, this is
not the only way of doing so: just as one can think of, say, a conjunctive content as resulting from the
application of the logical operation of conjunction to two further contents without thinking of those
contents as being in any sense parts of the conjunctive content, one can similarly understand talk of
‘constituency’ for thoughts in terms of the application of syntactic operations on thoughts: see §1.1.
INTRODUCTION 
least partly, depends on goings-on outside of Sally. But one can also contrive
thought experiments to show that the extensions of the mental correlates of
sentences and predicates at least partly depend on external goings-on. Suppose,
for example, that a dog is placed in front of Sally. A well-disguised cat made to
look just like the actual dog could have been placed in front of Sally instead. We
can fill in the details so that in both the actual and the counterfactual situation
goings-on inside Sally are just the same, but in the latter the thought Sally would
express by the sentence ‘There is a dog in front of me’ is false while in the former
it is true. So the extension (truth value) of an entire thought can vary across
possible situations even while the insides of the thinker remain the same. Suppose
further that in the counterfactual situation some actual dog (take your pick when
filling in the details) does not exist at all. Then there is something, i.e., that dog;
that is part of the extension of the thought constituent corresponding to ‘dog’ in
the actual situation but is not part of it in the counterfactual situation. And so the
extensions of thought constituents corresponding to predicates can vary across
possible situations even while the insides of the thinker stay the same. All of this
is completely uncontroversial. There is very little point in spending time on the
thesis that extensions cannot vary without the insides of agents varying, since
only extraordinarily eccentric views would lend any credence at all to that thesis.⁸
We have been celebrating a series of uncontroversial points. But not far away
there are some more controversial questions. We wish to isolate four of them in
particular. Notice that the above cases each involved agents in pairs of possible but
not compossible situations. These cases showed that, for no kind of expression, or
corresponding thought constituent, does sameness of inner goings-on across
possible situations guarantee a match of extension across possible situations.⁹
However, certain possible situations contain pairs of duplicate agents—that is,
pairs of agents whose inner goings-on are exactly the same. And for various kinds
of expressions, or their mental correlates, we can ask whether there is a single
possible situation in which there are two duplicate agents for whom expressions of
that type, and their thought correlates, do not have the same extension. For certain
⁸ The Spinozistic doctrine that there is only one possible world—which is equivalent to the claim
that whatever is so is necessarily so—is one such view.
⁹ Yet there may be particular expressions, or perhaps, more modestly, particular expressions as
used on particular occasions by particular agents, for which sameness of inner goings-on in two
possible situations guarantees sameness of extension—and similarly for the mental correlates of
those expressions. For example, it would not be completely implausible to suggest—although this,
too, can be challenged—that what goes on inside you fixes the extension (referent) of the numeral ‘0’
as used by you now, so that there is no possible situation in which someone who is exactly like you
actually are on the inside refers to anything other than the number 0 by the numeral ‘0’; and
similarly for the corresponding thought constituent.
 NARROW CONTENT
types of expressions the answer is very obvious. For example, it is easy to think of a
possible situation in which there are duplicate agents whose corresponding proper
names refer to different objects. It is also easy to imagine how, as a result, some
corresponding sentences have different truth values. Thus proper names and
sentences can vary in extension even across duplicate agents within a single
possible situation, and likewise for their mental correlates. But perhaps there are
interesting categories of expression for which such variation is not possible. For
example, it is not immediately obvious that there is a possible situation in which
there are two duplicate agents, one of whom is an English speaker, who associate
different extensions with the words ‘tall’, ‘runs’, or ‘red’. The first question, then, is
whether there are interesting kinds of expression, and mental correlates, for which
such variation in extension is impossible. The second question concerns contents,
as introduced above. It is clear enough that the truth value of, say, an utterance of
the sentence ‘There are dogs with red bow ties’, and of its mental correlate, can
vary across possible situations even though the speaker-thinker’s inner goings-on
don’t vary. But that does not by any means settle the question of whether the
content expressed by an utterance of ‘There are dogs with red bow ties’, and the
content of its mental correlate, can so vary. Indeed, in the most straightforward
cases it is natural to think that the truth value does vary while the content does
not. The second question is this: granted that extension can vary across possible
situations while inner goings-on remain the same, can content vary in this way?
Here is a third question: even if content can vary across possible situations while
inner goings-on remain the same, is there a single possible situation in which
there are duplicate agents whose corresponding linguistic expressions (expression
utterances) and their mental correlates differ in content? The fourth question is
this: even if contents in general can vary in the second and third ways, are there at
least some kinds of expressions and mental correlates whose content is immune to
this kind of variation? (For now we will assume that the content of an utterance of
a linguistic expression and its mental correlate are the same, and similarly for
extension; these assumptions can be and have been challenged.)
Just about any philosopher familiar with these questions also knows that a
series of important papers by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge introduce a range
of thought experiments that combine to make an anti-variance approach to any
of these questions very challenging. And indeed just about any paper in contem-
porary philosophy that addresses any of these questions will use Putnam’s and
Burge’s work as a springboard. Let us briefly rehearse a few of the key ideas and
observations of these papers.
Putnam’s paper, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ (1975), is almost entirely
focused on what he calls ‘natural kind terms’ like ‘gold’, ‘water’, and ‘electron’.
INTRODUCTION 
These are terms whose extensions purport to correspond to fundamental dis-

tinctions in nature itself, as opposed to terms for kinds like sausage, cheese, and
beer, which are not ones we expect to be studied by natural science. A famous
thought experiment in Putnam’s paper involves a possible situation in which
there are two planets, one of which is Earth, exactly as it actually is, and the other
of which is Twin Earth, a planet that is almost exactly like Earth and that is
inhabited, in 1750, by duplicates of all of the people on Earth in 1750 (the history
of the planets will later diverge). One difference between the planets is that, on
Twin Earth, the stuff that fills the oceans, flows in rivers, and so on, although
superficially just like H₂O, is not H₂O—that is, is not water, since water is H₂O—
but is another chemical compound, XYZ.¹⁰ What this case directly shows is that
even within a single possible situation the extensions of natural kind terms can
vary between duplicate agents: when, in this situation, Oscar, an inhabitant of
Earth, uses the term ‘water’, that term, as used by him, refers, of course, to water—
that is, to H₂O—whereas the corresponding term, as used by Oscar’s Twin Earth
duplicate, Twin Oscar, refers to XYZ, which is not water (even though, of course,
Twin Oscar uses a word that sounds and is spelled exactly like ‘water’ to refer to it).
This kind of variation in extension is induced by variation in the agent’s
natural surroundings, but there is another phenomenon, which Putnam also
discusses, that can also induce variation in extension between duplicate agents
within a single possible situation without variation in inner goings-on. This
phenomenon has to do with variation in the agent’s social surroundings. For
many of the words we use, Putnam thinks, there is a ‘division of linguistic labour’,
in which ordinary speakers defer to experts to (partly) fix the extensions of some
of the terms they use. For example—illustrating the phenomenon with a pair of
non-natural kind terms—while ordinary speakers of English are typically not able
to tell the difference between a slice of sirloin and a slice of topside by appearance,
texture, flavour, etc., they nevertheless manage to associate different extensions
with the terms ‘sirloin’ and ‘topside’ by deferring to experts who know the
definitions of culinary terms. To paraphrase Putnam, the division of labour here
can be pictured as one in which there are some people whose job it is to eat sirloin,
others whose job it is to cook sirloin, and yet others whose job it is to know the
difference between sirloin and other cuts of beef. All three groups of people use
the term ‘sirloin’, but the extension of ‘sirloin’ is fixed (holding other facts about
¹⁰ The example is not optimal because human bodies are mostly made up of water, so, one might
think, there cannot be duplicates—things that are exactly alike on the inside—of all of the humans
alive in 1750 on Twin Earth. The problem, however, is easy to fix: replace ‘water’ with some other
natural kind term that designates a stuff not found in human bodies.
 NARROW CONTENT
the world fixed¹¹) by the way the third group uses the term. Thus there are
possible situations in which duplicate non-expert speakers are embedded in
communities whose experts use certain words differently (e.g., by using different
definitions or different criteria), resulting in a difference of extension between the
duplicate speakers. Consider, for example, a situation in which there are two
countries, Canada and Twin Canada, with duplicate non-expert residents, Sarah
and Twin Sarah, such that the beef experts in Canada use ‘sirloin’ as it is actually
used in Canada, while their counterparts in Twin Canada use ‘sirloin’ to refer to
topside. In this situation (provided that the details are filled in suitably) ‘sirloin’ as
used by Sarah will have all and only the sirloin in its extension, whereas ‘sirloin’ as
used by Twin Sarah will have all and only the topside in its extension. The thought
correlates of ‘sirloin’ will then also have different extensions for Sarah and Twin
Sarah, while their inner goings-on are the same. (Putnam’s own examples all
involve natural kind terms, but he does not say, nor does he give the reader any
reasons to think, that the phenomenon of the division of linguistic labour is
confined to natural kind terms.)
Of course, nothing immediately follows about our question concerning con-
tent or even about linguistic meaning. And indeed Putnam is aware of this. For
example, while it is obvious that the extension of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ can
vary between duplicates, Putnam displays an openness to the view that the
meaning of ‘I’ is the same for all duplicates. Nevertheless, at least in the case of
natural kind terms Putnam seems to assume that meaning determines extension,
in the sense that it is impossible for there to be a pair of natural kind terms
that have the same meaning while differing in extension. Given this assumption,
it follows that the terms used by the duplicate speakers in the scenarios we
have discussed differ in meaning. And this is indeed the conclusion Putnam
wishes to draw.¹²
¹¹ The experts’ use of the word does not fully determine the extension. The way the world is in
other respects will also make a difference to the extension. For example, if somehow, miraculously,
both the expert and the non-expert speakers were just as they actually are on the inside, but there
were, and never had been, and never would be, any sirloins, then, plausibly, the extension of ‘sirloin’
would be different than it actually is: it would be the empty set. (We are deliberately insensitive to the
fact that ‘sirloin’ and ‘topside’ can be used as both count nouns—as in this footnote—and mass
nouns—as in the main text. It is actually unclear what kind of entity the extension of a mass noun is,
but this lack of clarity has not detained the vast literature responding to Putnam’s paper, in which
mass nouns—most notably, of course, ‘water’—are used as the central examples.)
¹² The argument of Putnam’s (1975) paper is, in fact, not easy to interpret. At the beginning of the
paper Putnam announces that he will argue against a pair of theses: roughly, (I) that the purely
internal aspect of a speaker’s psychological state determines the meanings of the speaker’s words
(here he speaks of ‘knowing the meaning’, but clearly the issue is not epistemological), and (II)
that meaning determines extension (p. 219). The Twin Earth scenario is clearly a counterexample to
this pair of theses, and the most widely quoted sentence of Putnam’s paper (according to which
INTRODUCTION 
Burge’s (1979) discussion has more direct relevance to our questions, for two
reasons. First, he is concerned directly with thoughts and not linguistic meaning.
And second, his remarks are by no means confined to thought constituents
corresponding to natural kind terms but seem prima facie generalizable to all
corners of thought. Unlike Putnam, Burge does not argue via a thesis about
extension variance to a thesis about content variance. Rather, he makes direct use
of a test for difference of content that he takes to be canonical. Burge follows what
is now the mainstream in thinking of ‘that’-clauses as specifying the contents of
thoughts and so thinks that, if the content of one thought can be specified by a
particular ‘that’-clause but the content of another thought cannot be specified by
the same ‘that’-clause, then the contents are distinct. With this test in place, Burge
thinks it’s already obvious that certain kinds of content aren’t determined by
inner goings-on. In particular, the contents of thoughts that we specify using
‘that’-clauses which contain names like ‘Jim’ and ‘London’ and by demonstratives
like ‘this’ and ‘that’ will, by Burge’s lights, not be fixed by inner goings-on. What
he thinks is less obvious, and which he undertakes to show using some famous
thought experiments, is that by this test the contents of general terms, and
of thought constituents corresponding to them, are not determined by inner
goings-on either. Burge’s idea is that something akin to Putnam’s division of
linguistic labour ensures that, for pretty much any general term, we can construct
a pair of possible cases in which duplicate agents associate different contents with
‘ “meanings” just ain’t in the head ’ [p. 227, italics in the original]), which seems to be presented as
summarizing one of his main conclusions, lends support to the view that Putnam takes the thought
experiment, together with (II), which he does not want to reject, to refute (I). This is, in our
experience, the most widespread interpretation of Putnam. However, this interpretation is difficult
to square with the fact that elsewhere in the paper Putnam rejects (II), citing so-called indexical
words like ‘I’ and ‘here’ as uncontroversial counterexamples to (II) (p. 234). On the same page he
also says that his thought experiment shows that ‘indexicality extends beyond the obviously
indexical words and morphemes’, that ‘[o]ur theory can be summarized as saying that words like
“water” have an unnoticed indexical component’, and that ‘our doctrine [is] that [natural kind
terms] are indexical’.
Finally, Putnam sketches a way of thinking about the meanings of words that has the conse-
quence, as he observes (p. 270), that a difference in extension always makes for a difference in
meaning. According to his sketch of a theory, the meaning of a word is a ‘vector’ that includes (i) the
syntactic category of the word, (ii) its ‘semantic markers’ (such as whether it is a natural kind term),
(iii) its associated stereotypes, and (iv) its extension (p. 269). Note that on this conception of
meaning the meaning of ‘philosopher’ would have been different (because its extension would
have been different) if, say, Saul Kripke had never become a philosopher, and, for any count noun
‘N ’, the meaning of ‘N ’ would have been different if there had been more or fewer Ns than there
actually are. This strikes us as implausible: whatever meaning is, we take it to be clear that meaning is
not so fickle that any variation between possibilities in the number of Ns is accompanied by a
difference in the meaning of ‘N ’.
We leave these exegetical problems for others to sort out.
 NARROW CONTENT
a general term owing to differences in the use of those terms between the
communities in which they are embedded. Burge’s most famous example con-
cerns the term ‘arthritis’. He asks us to consider an ordinary medically ignorant
English speaker, Bert, who falsely believes that arthritis, which is, in fact, exclu-
sively an ailment of the joints, can and does occur in his thigh. Thus Bert has a
false belief that he would express by the sentence ‘Some thighs suffer from
arthritis’.¹³ This belief is correctly ascribed by the sentence ‘Bert believes that
some thighs suffer from arthritis’, so its content is specified by the clause ‘that
some thighs suffer from arthritis’. Next we are asked to consider a possible
situation in which Bert’s inner goings-on are exactly as they actually are, but in
which Bert is embedded in a community in which the relevant experts—the
medical community—use ‘arthritis’ to mean something other than arthritis, call
this counterfactual meaning arthritis*. The details can be filled in in various ways,
but what matters here is that arthritis* is a condition that one can have in one’s
thigh, and in the counterfactual situation some people do have it in their thighs,
so, consequently, because ‘arthritis’ in Bert’s mouth means whatever it means in
the expert’s mouths, the belief he expresses by ‘Some thighs suffer from
arthritis’ is true. Burge observes that it would not be correct (for us, in the
actual situation) to report the belief Bert has in the counterfactual situation
using ‘that some thighs suffer from arthritis’; in the counterfactual situation
Bert does not believe that some thighs suffer from arthritis, but rather that some
thighs suffer from arthritis*. By Burge’s test, then, the belief Bert expresses by
‘Some thighs suffer from arthritis’ has different contents in the actual and
counterfactual situations, even though his inner goings-on are the same in the
two situations. (That Bert’s thoughts have different truth values in the two
possible situations plays no role in this argument, although there is a variant of
the argument that does exploit the difference in truth value, which we will
discuss below.)
While one might think that ‘arthritis’ is a natural kind term, Burge’s view is
that the phenomenon of the social determination of linguistic meaning, and
thereby of thought content, affects all kinds of general terms, and indeed other
kinds of words. It is also worth noting that, while Burge’s own thought experi-
ments involve two different (and incompossible) possibilities, one can construct
similar thought experiments involving a pair of duplicate agents embedded in
different communities within the same possible situation. Instead of considering
Bert in two distinct possible situations in which words are used differently, we
could consider a single possible situation containing both Bert and a duplicate
¹³ This is not Burge’s example, but it fits our exposition better.

INTRODUCTION 
of Bert (Twin Bert) embedded in communities that differ in the way the com-
munities in the two possible situations described above do. Then, in this possible
situation, Bert’s belief would be correctly ascribed (by us, speaking in the actual
situation) using the clause ‘that some thighs suffer from arthritis’, but Twin Bert’s
would not. By Burge’s test, this would show that the beliefs differ in content even
though the believers’ inner goings-on are the same. Note also that (although
Burge himself does not argue this way), if we assumed, with Putnam,¹⁴ that
content determines extension—in this case, truth value—we could also use the
difference in truth value between Bert’s and Twin Bert’s beliefs to establish that
they have different contents.
Burge’s thought experiments, and variations on them, can be used to speak to a
number of the other questions that we posed above. If Burge is right, the
extension of ‘arthritis’ can vary not just across distinct possible situations but
within the same possible situation while the inner goings-on of its user remain
the same. And if this phenomenon can be replicated for any kind of expression—
something strongly suggested by Burge’s discussion—then no term will be
immune to the possibility of variation in extension across duplicates within a
world. Moreover, if we adopt Burge’s test for difference of content, we will have to
accept that the corresponding thoughts of the relevant duplicates within a single
possible situation have different contents. (Adopting the assumption that content
determines extension would also force us to accept that conclusion.) And insofar
as this kind of content variation can be replicated for any kind of word, there will
be no kind of word for which the corresponding thought constituent’s content is
guaranteed to be the same between duplicates within a world.
It is worth some emphasis that Burge’s test for content difference does not
detect any difference between indexical and non-indexical expressions (as Burge
himself recognized¹⁵). This seems to conflict with Putnam’s view. For consider a
possible situation in which Bert and Twin Bert are embedded in the same
community of English speakers, and each of them sincerely asserts: ‘I am
human’. The thoughts they express by that sentence could be correctly ascribed
using the clause ‘that he is human’. However, Bert’s thought could also be
correctly (if somewhat redundantly) ascribed using ‘that Bert is human’, while
Twin Bert’s thought could not. By Burge’s test, then, we must conclude that the
thoughts differ in content, as indeed they intuitively do. We can also conclude
that the content of the thought constituent corresponding to Bert’s use of ‘I’ is
different from the content of the thought constituent corresponding to Twin
¹⁴ According to the standard interpretation, but see note 12. ¹⁵ Burge (1980: §II).
 NARROW CONTENT
Bert’s use of ‘I’, because the details can be filled in in such a way as to guarantee
that the contents of all of the other constituents of their corresponding thoughts
are the same. As far as mental content is concerned, then, there is no reason
at all to posit a difference between thoughts expressed using indexical words
and others with respect to any of the questions about content variation we
have raised.
Putnam, however, does not thereby stand refuted.¹⁶ For recall that his was a
discussion of (linguistic) meaning rather than mental content. What the above
considerations suggest, rather, is that we must draw a distinction between
linguistic meaning and assertoric content. The meaning of a linguistic expression
may remain the same while its assertoric content (what is asserted by it or what it
contributes to what is asserted by sentences in which it occurs) does not. For
example it is as clear as anything in this area that the word ‘I’ has the same
meaning on any occasion of use, at least for normal speakers of English, while the
extension (referent) of ‘I’ is not the same on every occasion of use, even for
normal speakers of English. When you use ‘I’, it refers to you; when Juhani uses
‘I’, it refers to Juhani; when Hilary Putnam used ‘I’, it referred to Hilary Putnam,
and so on. Indexicals therefore are, we agree, a genuine counterexample to the
claim that linguistic meaning determines extension. But it is hard to see how they
could be counterexamples to the claim that assertoric content determines exten-
sion. For when Juhani asserts the sentence ‘I am an author of Narrow Content’ it
is reasonably clear that he says something different than you do when you assert
‘I am an author of Narrow Content’.¹⁷ (To argue for this we can, inter alia, apply a
version of Burge’s test for content difference to assertions: Juhani said that Juhani
is an author or Narrow Content, but you did not say that Juhani is an author of
Narrow Content, so you and he did not say the same thing. Or we could observe
that what Juhani said is true and what you said is not true, and infer from this that
you and he did not say the same thing.) Given that the other words in the
sentence asserted have the same assertoric contents, the difference in the asser-
toric content of the whole sentence on the two occasions of use can only be due to
a difference in the assertoric content of ‘I’ on those occasions.
The observations of the previous paragraph are far from novel; in fact, they are
treated as platitudes in mainstream philosophy of language. In that field the
distinction between meaning and assertoric content is a standard part of the
¹⁶ On one interpretation, at least: again, see note 12 for a discussion of some difficulties in
interpreting Putnam’s position.
¹⁷ Even Lewis (1979), who claims that the beliefs so expressed have the same content, does not
deny this. We discuss Lewis’s views in §3.
INTRODUCTION 
theorist’s toolkit, into which it was introduced by David Kaplan’s classic work
‘Demonstratives’ (1977).¹⁸ (Kaplan’s terms for what we are calling ‘meaning’
and ‘assertoric content’ were, respectively, ‘character’ and ‘content’.) What
bears emphasis here is that, if there is a straightforward route from the semantic
properties of utterances of linguistic expressions to the contents of the correspond-
ing thought constituents—as we, with much of the literature, tend to suppose that
there is—it will be a route from assertoric content, not meaning, to thought
content. In particular, the route will be this: the assertoric content of an utterance
of a sentence is the same entity as the content of the thought that the sentence
expresses, or, in any case, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the
assertoric contents of sentence utterances and the contents of the thoughts they
express (and similarly for sentence constituents and thought constituents).¹⁹
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the meanings of the sentences
that get asserted and the contents of the thoughts expressed because assertions of
sentences containing indexicals may express thoughts with different contents
while the meaning remains the same.
(The considerations of the foregoing paragraph raise an interesting further
question about linguistic meaning: is the meaning of a linguistic utterance,
conceived as distinct from its assertoric content, determined by the speaker’s
inner goings-on? Since our focus is on thoughts rather than on linguistic utter-
ances, we will not be dealing with this question directly, even though it is the
question to which Putnam’s classic paper is perhaps most directly addressed.
However, a negative answer to it does follow from the view, which we find
plausible, that the natural kind terms Putnam discusses are not indexicals²⁰ and
that their assertoric contents differ, in the cases he discusses, between duplicate
¹⁸ Here we are following a usage of ‘assertoric/assertive content’ that traces back to Humberstone
(1976). The technical term ‘assertoric content’, which has become a standard one in the philosophy
of language, is not supposed to suggest that sentences (even taken in contexts of utterance) assert
things. People assert things; sentences don’t. The idea, rather, is that when a sentence is used by an
agent to make a literal assertion, what is asserted is the assertoric content the sentence has in the
context in which the assertion occurs. In this literature, sub-sentential expressions are also said to
have assertoric contents, which are their contributions to the assertoric contents of sentences.
An anonymous referee for Oxford University Press suggested that, in addition to the distinction
between character and content, there is a further distinction between these two and ‘ingredient
sense’, as discussed by Dummett (1973, 1991), Humberstone (1976), Evans (1979), and others, and
that ingredient sense might plausibly be identified with the pretheoretic notion of meaning. We will
not be discussing ingredient sense construed as a distinctive phenomenon, since we find the notion
too obscure to be able to theorize about in a rigorous way.
¹⁹ Here we are making the fairly harmless assumption that even a lie expresses a thought with a
content that corresponds to the assertoric content, albeit one that is not believed by the liar.
²⁰ In Kaplanian lingo, this is the thesis that natural kind terms have constant characters.
 NARROW CONTENT
speakers. In §1.5.4 we will ask whether the notion of meaning, construed as

Kaplanian character, can be applied to thoughts.)
The papers by Burge and Putnam sparked a vast literature to which this book is
intended to be a contribution. One interesting question is why the topic of
whether content is determined by inner goings-on, while a lively topic of debate
in the last forty or so years, does not seem to have been much of a topic at all for
the other many centuries of Western philosophy. We cannot quite say that the
topic was never raised before Putnam and Burge. In a relatively unknown
passage, which Dagfinn Fllesdal has brought to our attention, Husserl seemed
to be getting at the issue:
But how is it, if on two celestial bodies two people in surroundings that seem to be
totally similar, conceive of “the same” objects and adjust their utterances accordingly?
Does not the “this” in these two cases have a different meaning?²¹
And while there may be other relevant isolated passages that we don’t know
about in the history of philosophy, there certainly hasn’t been any lively discus-
sion of whether thought content is determined by inner goings-on until the last
four decades or so of analytic philosophy. We are not exactly sure why this is so,
but we have a few conjectures.
First, prior to Frege’s ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892) there is hardly any
systematic discussion of the distinction between content and extension, and without
that distinction in place it is very difficult to even raise the question of whether
content is ‘in the head’ as a question to be considered separately from the question of
whether extension is ‘in the head’. Thus, for example, once Ockham had recognized
that the referents (extensions) of cognitive acts were not internally determined,
there was no further salient issue concerning the determination of content.
Second, philosophical work on the topic of supervenience was just getting
started around the time Putnam and Burge published their papers, and that work
allowed a number of relevant theses to be clarified and sharpened in a way that
facilitated productive debate. In particular, the ideology of supervenience, which
we ourselves make significant use of throughout this book, provides useful
sharpenings of Putnam’s use of ‘determines’ and Burge’s use of ‘stem from’,
and indeed those sharpenings have become the framework within which most of
the discussion has proceeded.²²
²¹ Quoted in Fllesdal (forthcoming).

²² That is not to say that Putnam and Burge’s ideology must be sharpened in this way. The more
recently fashionable ideology of ‘grounding’, while certainly less clear than the well-understood
ideology of supervenience, provides another framework in which one might conduct the debate.
We will briefly return to this theme in later chapters.
INTRODUCTION 
Further, and relatedly, the issue of whether contents are fixed by inner goings-
on can only be seriously engaged with once one has sharply distinguished the
notion of metaphysical necessity from other notions in the vicinity, such as a
priority, analyticity, epistemic necessity, and logical necessity. (Throughout this
introduction we have been talking about ‘possible situations’; by this we mean
metaphysical possibilities.) Arguably before the work of Saul Kripke²³ these
notions were sufficiently muddled together as to preclude clear debate. (It’s not
that philosophers never understood the key relevant concepts. It’s just that the
dark ages of early modern philosophy intervened to obscure most of the good
work of the medieval period, and it took philosophy centuries to recover.)
Finally, we conjecture that the topic of whether content is fixed by inner
goings-on was more salient in an era when philosophers were apt to think of
thoughts as in some way depending on more fundamental (e.g., brain) states and
were producing theories about the nature of that dependence. For example,
Putnam seems to have been led to write ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ at least
in part because he noticed that the then-fashionable doctrine of functionalism,²⁴
according to which there is nothing more to a mental state than its role in
mediating the transition from perceptual inputs to behavioural outputs, seemed
to imply that only the inner causal nexus is relevant to the determination of
meaning and content.
Our conjecture is that some combination of the four factors cited above goes a
long way towards explaining the emergence of ‘internalism about mental content’
as a major topic in recent philosophy. But we are not going to pursue these
historical themes any further.
One theme in the literature that followed the papers by Putnam and Burge
bears special emphasis. Until now we have been talking as if there were such a
thing as the content of a thought. However, a number of authors have come to
the conclusion that, while Burge and others are right that there is a kind of
content that is not internally determined, there is nevertheless another kind
of content that is. Sometimes this pluralism is accompanied by a thesis of
vagueness. For example, Ned Block²⁵ has suggested that the notion of content
is sufficiently vague to allow multiple precisifications for only some of which
Burge’s conclusion is correct. Others have more or less conceded that the
ordinary notion of content, or at least that implicit in the ordinary use of
‘that’-clauses, is one for which Burge’s conclusion is correct, but that there is
²³ In particular, Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1980), which was originally published in 1972
(Kripke 1972).
²⁴ Which Putnam (e.g., 1960) was partly responsible for inventing. ²⁵ Block (1986).
 NARROW CONTENT
nevertheless another kind of content that is internally determined. According to

yet another view, while the notion of assertoric content is one for which Burge’s
conclusion is correct, the notion of mental content corresponds to a phenom-
enon that is internally determined.
In this book we try to be sensitive to the possibility of this kind of pluralism.
Our targets do not only include philosophers who think there is only one
interesting kind of mental content and that it is internally determined, but also
pluralists, who think that at least one interesting kind of mental content is
internally determined. (We will use ‘internalist’ as a blanket term for these
targets, and the term ‘narrow content’ for a kind of content that is internally
determined.) One persistent theme in the writings of internalists is the idea that
the kind of content that is internally determined can play certain special explana-
tory roles to which other kinds of content are constitutively unfit. For example,
David Lewis, who was arguably the first philosopher to develop a theory of
narrow content, suggested that only narrow content is suitable for coding the
epistemological properties of thoughts and, furthermore, that the whole point of
mental content attribution is to ‘characterize states of the head’ and ‘to specify
their causal roles with respect to behavior, stimuli, and one another’—all con-
strued as internal goings-on—yet he was open to the view that linguistic content
is not internally determined.²⁶ David Chalmers develops a somewhat similar but
far more detailed framework for theorizing about mental content. In Chalmers’
work, which is certainly the most widely cited body of internalist theorizing at
present, the explanatory emphasis vis-à-vis narrow content is squarely on the
epistemological properties of thought.²⁷
Questions of explanation will loom large in the chapters to come. As we will
make vivid, the question whether there is a kind of content that is internally
determined only gets interesting when some explanatory role is claimed for the
relevant kind of content. Following a good deal of the literature, we will primarily
explore whether narrow content is connected to a priority and other rationality-
theoretic properties and relations. We will, however, mention various other
explanatory roles, and insofar as we don’t pursue those ourselves we will at
least provide the reader with the tools for the appropriate investigation. We are
also sensitive to the question of whether the notion of content implicit in
ordinary thought and talk corresponds to a phenomenon that is internally
determined. And we will give that question extensive separate treatment.
²⁶ Lewis (1979: 526). ²⁷ See e.g., Chalmers (2003, 2006a).

INTRODUCTION 
Again, in line with much of the literature, we will be using the ideology of
supervenience as a way of making sense of talk of ‘determination’. The basic idea
is to gloss talk of one phenomenon determining a second as the claim that
the second cannot vary without the first varying. We will, of course, endeavour
to make all of this precise. (We are aware of other ways of making sense of
determination and we will briefly discuss those as well.)
By comparison with most of the literature, our presentation of claims of
determination and other relevant theses makes substantial use of the tools of
formal logic. We don’t regard this as self-indulgence on our part. Rather, we
believe that the easiest path to progress in this area is to present theses with
maximal rigor and precision, so that their logical relations become maximally
vivid. We have, however, given informal glosses of all of the main claims that we
make and discuss, so that it is possible to read the book without dwelling on the
formalized claims.
Here is the briefest of overviews of what is to come. In §1 we clarify and make
precise a number of the key notions that will be used in the rest of the book—
most notably those of content and narrowness. In §2 we argue that internalists
are committed to a kind of relativism, and that theirs is a particularly radical form
of relativism. In §3 we explore how the question of whether the ordinary notion
of content—what we call ur-content—is narrow, trying as best as we can, on
behalf of the internalist, to fend off objections that emerge from the work of
Putnam and Burge. In §4 we ask whether a range of properties and relations
relating to a priority can be explained by any kind of narrow content, and we
come to a pessimistic conclusion. §§1–4 operate with and make precise a notion
of narrowness that is pretty standard in the literature. §§5 and 6 ask whether
alternative construals of narrowness might be better suited to explaining the
epistemological properties that interest internalists. Internalists standardly think
of narrow content as being fixed by the qualitative structure of our inner lives,
disregarding the particular individual objects in the qualitative nexus. But, on the
face of it, it seems that one could have a notion of narrowness that does not
disregard individual objects in this way. §5 pursues this line of thought and finds
it to be rather unpromising. §6 explores a more promising but even more radical
departure from standard internalist theorizing. It not only introduces a new
notion of narrowness but more strikingly gives explanatory pride of place not
to content but to semantic relations between thought constituents. While more
promising than the others, this approach also faces very serious obstacles, and we
conclude this book by outlining a range of them.
1
What is narrow content?
1.1. The bearers of content

In line with much of the relevant literature, we will think of thought tokens
(henceforth simply thoughts) as the primary bearers of content.¹ Of course,
linguistic utterances are also bearers of content, but we will not challenge the
orthodox view that the contents of linguistic utterances are parasitic on the
contents of the thoughts that generate them.
Thoughts, as we are thinking of them, are representational events (states or
episodes) that occur in an agent at a time, and are naturally characterized by
familiar psychological verbs that take ‘that’-clauses as complements.² Suppose a
sentence of the form
ð1Þ x Vs that p
is true, where ‘V’ is a psychological verb, such as ‘believe’ or ‘desire’. We assume

that there will then be an event that is a V-ing of which the referent of ‘x’ is the
¹ For example, Chalmers (2006a: 96): ‘A thought is understood here as a token mental state,
and in particular as a sort of occurrent propositional attitude: roughly, an entertaining of a
content . . . Like beliefs, thoughts are assessable for truth. Thoughts can come to be accepted, yielding
beliefs, and thoughts can come to be justified, often yielding knowledge.’ It’s unclear, however,
whether Chalmers thinks, as we do, that belief tokens are thoughts. Chalmers’ way of thinking about
thoughts does clearly differ from ours in that he requires thoughts to be ‘occurrent’, whereas we do
not. On our way of thinking, for example, whenever x believes that p at time t, at t there is a thought
whose agent is x, and that thought is a belief. Chalmers also does not seem to think of token desires
as thoughts, as he thinks that thoughts are ‘generally expressed by utterances of declarative
sentences’ (ibid.). Below, we characterize thoughts as the kinds of mental states (state tokens) that
are generally reported using, rather than expressed by, declarative sentences embedded in ‘that’-
clauses occurring as complements of psychological verbs.
² In what follows, we will not make heavy weather of whatever distinctions there are between
events, states, and episodes. Like much of the natural language semantics literature, we will use the
term ‘event’ for whatever sorts of things the so-called event variables posited in sentences like (1)
take as values. Sometimes these are more naturally described as ‘states’ than as ‘events’.
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
agent and which is suitably related to the proposition (content) expressed by the
sentence ‘p’.³
Here is a popular way of spelling out this idea within the framework of natural
language semantics: sentences with the superficial form of (1) have something
like (2) as their underlying logical form.
ð2Þ ∃eðAGENTðe; xÞ∧CONTENTðe; that pÞ∧VðeÞÞ4
Note that, according to this analysis, while the psychological verb ‘V’ in (1)
appears to form a complex one-place predicate ‘Vs that p’ that is true of agents, at
the level of logical form ‘V’ is a one-place predicate that is true of events: the
argument of ‘V’ in (2) is the variable ‘e’, which takes events as values.
If, as we tend to think, the logical form of a sentence of the superficial form (1)
is something like (2), then sentences of the superficial form (1) contain an
unpronounced predicate for a certain relation in which thoughts stand to con-
tents, which we have written in (2), following Pietroski (2000), as ‘CONTENT’.
We will assume that this relation is a function—i.e., that, necessarily, CONTENT
relates each thought to exactly one content—and we will call it the ur-content
assignment.⁵ We will call the value of the ur-content assignment for a particular
thought its ur-content. Thus, e.g., the ur-content of your belief that there are no
green baboons is (the proposition) that there are no green baboons. We will also
tend to use ‘ur-content’ as a shorthand for ‘the ur-content assignment’.
When we discuss examples of beliefs and other kinds of thoughts in this book,
we will often specify them using quoted English sentences, as in:
Jones thinks, ‘That is red’.
This is to be understood as shorthand for:
Jones has a thought that he would express by the sentence ‘That is red’.
³ While we like this way of introducing the notion of content, someone who follows Lewis’s
(1979) apparent suggestion that thought ur-content is narrow while linguistic (assertoric) content—
i.e., what is literally expressed by an utterance of a declarative sentence—is broad, will have to say
something else. We discuss Lewis’s suggestion in §3.1.2.
⁴ Of course, fans of modes of presentation might argue that sentences of the superficial form (1)
have a more complex logical form that involves reference to or existential quantification over modes
of presentation. One could, for example, develop the theory of Kaplan (1968) in this way.
⁵ Much of what we say can be adapted to a framework in which a thought has many ur-contents
(e.g., for reasons of vagueness), but this will certainly not always be a trivial exercise. We’ll leave the
relevant exploration to those readers who are attracted to the view that some thoughts have more
than one ur-content. See Bradwardine (2010) for an early exploration of the pluralist view and Dorr
and Hawthorne (2014) for a more recent one.
 NARROW CONTENT
In such a case we are imagining an agent who speaks English or a language very much
like English and who has ready to hand a sentence of that language to express
the thought. Sometimes we will also specify thoughts using ‘that’-clauses, as in:
one’s thought that snow is white
In such a case we are considering a thought with a particular ur-content: the one
specified by the ‘that’-clause.
Four further points of clarification follow.
First, in saying that the ur-content of your belief that there are no green
baboons is a certain proposition—to wit, the proposition that there are no
green baboons—we do not mean to be taking on any contentious theoretical
commitments regarding the nature of ur-contents. For example, for some philo-
sophers it is axiomatic that propositions have their truth values ‘simpliciter’, but
we make no such assumption. We do not rule out, for example, relativist views
according to which propositions only have truth values relative to this or that
standard of taste, judge, or other alethic parameter.
Second, even if a certain belief or other propositional attitude is ‘dispositional’,
as opposed to ‘occurrent’—perhaps realized by some conscious judgment or by
the production of some sentence-like structure—it will still be a ‘thought’ in the
sense that we have just introduced it, since the occurrence of a dispositional
attitude is an event.
Third, we are open to the Ockhamist doctrine (which is now more commonly
associated with Fodor) that the occurrence of a thought is somehow underwritten by
the tokening of a sentence of mental language.⁶ On this hypothesis the ur-content of
the thought is arguably explained by the semantic profile of the mental language
sentence token, and the latter rather than the former is the truly primary bearer of
content. However, while we are open to this view, we will not assume it in the
discussion that follows. Relatedly, we will not assume that each thought occurs at a
specific location in the brain. Perhaps some thoughts are diffusely located, perhaps
underwritten by the agent’s pattern of behavioural dispositions. (However, it is hard,
for example, to think of inner conscious judgings in this way.)
Fourth, although we are inclined to accept the popular hypothesis that (1) has
something like (2) as its logical form, this assumption is not required for
⁶ See the Introduction, note 7. Insofar as one thinks of an LOT sentence on the model of written
language, there is of course a distinction between the token sentence (inscription) and the event of its
production. Given that distinction, it is perhaps more natural, since thoughts are events and
inscriptions are not, to think of the thought as the latter rather than as the former.
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
characterizing ur-content as the function denoted by ‘CONTENT’ in (2). It is

sufficient that (1) is truth-conditionally equivalent, as indeed seems to be the
case, to (2). The principle that x believes (or desires, etc.) that p if and only if
has a belief (or desire, etc.) whose ur-content is the proposition that p seems
unexceptionable.
We are going to talk as if it were necessary that each thought has a truth value:
either Truth (T) or Falsehood (F)—whichever is the truth value of the thought’s
ur-content (at its index). This is, of course, a marked departure from ordinary
English, where we do not ascribe truth or falsehood to, for example, token hopes
or token desires. Even on this deviant usage, talk of ‘the truth value’ of a thought
is something of an idealization: some thoughts—including thoughts of the kind it
is natural to call ‘true’ or ‘false’ in ordinary English, may lack a truth value in
virtue of having no ur-content. Arguably, for example, the thought ‘This thought
is false’, where the ‘this’ refers to that very thought, has no ur-content and
consequently no truth value. (Given classical logic and certain further plausible
assumptions, we can prove it has no truth value.) In §6 we will investigate the
consequences of relaxing this idealization for the case of semantically defective
thoughts.
Some of our arguments will assume that some thoughts are formed by
applying some logical operations to other thoughts. In particular, we will assume
that thoughts can be formed by the application of the five truth-functional
operations of negation (~), conjunction (&), disjunction (v), the material condi-
tional (), and the material biconditional (). Letting ‘|α|’ designate the truth
value of the thought α, and using the variables ‘α’, ‘β’, ‘γ’, . . . for thoughts, we will
assume the following about the truth-functional operations.
Truth-Functionality
ðiÞ h8α ð~α is a thought ! ðj~αj ¼ T $ jαj ¼ FÞÞ
ðiiÞ h8α8β ðα & β is a thought ! ðjα & βj ¼ T $ ðjαj ¼ T ∧ jβj ¼ TÞÞÞ
ðiiiÞ h8α8β ðα v β is a thought ! ðjα v βj ¼ T $ ðjαj ¼ T ∨ jβj ¼ TÞÞÞ
ðivÞ h8α8βðα β is a thought ! ðjα βj ¼ T $ ðjαj ¼ T ! jβj ¼ TÞÞÞ
ðvÞ h8α8βðα β is a thought ! ðjα βj ¼ T $ ðjαj ¼ jβjÞÞ
(Above and throughout this book we use ‘¬’, ‘∧’, ‘∨’, ‘!’, ‘$’ as truth-functional
connectives whose meanings are given by the familiar classical truth tables. In
contrast, we use the symbols ‘~’, ‘&’, ‘v’, ‘’, ‘’ not as sentential connectives at
all, but only as function symbols that designate truth-functional operations on
thoughts. Thus, e.g., ‘&’ is a function symbol that applies to a pair of singular
 NARROW CONTENT
terms denoting thoughts and forms another singular term that also denotes a
thought, provided that the conjunction of the thoughts denoted by the terms to
which it is applied occurs. In contrast, ‘∧’ is a connective that applies to a pair of
sentences and forms a sentence. Thus expressions of the form ‘α&β’ are singular
terms, and expressions of the form ‘S ∧ T’ are sentences.⁷)
Truth-Functionality says that it is necessary that the truth-value of a thought
formed out of some other thought(s) by the application of a truth-functional
operation o is determined by the truth values of the thought(s) to which o is
applied by the classical truth table associated with o. The ‘is a thought’ restriction
is needed in each clause of Truth-Functionality because thoughts, unlike sen-
tences or contents, are not generally closed under logical operations: that a
thought α occurs is no guarantee that, e.g., its negation ~α also occurs. We
assume that, necessarily, anything that is possibly a thought (a possible thought)
is such that, necessarily, it is a thought if and only if it occurs; thus, as applied to
possible thoughts, the predicates ‘is a thought’ and ‘occurs’ are interchangeable in
this book. When we use ‘occurs’ we do so for strictly stylistic reasons. (So, e.g.,
speaking of counterfactual conditions under which certain thoughts ‘would have
occurred’ tends to sound more natural than speaking of counterfactual condi-
tions under which those thoughts ‘would have been thoughts’.)
Truth-Functionality is not a particularly remarkable assumption: insofar as
one is working with classical logic, as we are, one should expect it to be necessary
that the truth values of truth-functionally complex thoughts are determined by
the truth values of their immediate constituents according to the classical truth
tables. But note that Truth-Functionality is a substantive assumption that goes
well beyond what one learns in any logic course: classical truth-functional logic
does not tell us that anything is necessarily so, and, while quantified modal logic
does tell us that some things are necessarily so, it does not tell us whether any of
(i)–(v) obtain. Truth-Functionality is part of our theory of thoughts—a theory
featuring such non-logical primitives as ‘is a thought’,⁸ ‘T’, and ‘F’. It is not a
⁷ David Chalmers, Cian Dorr, and an anonymous referee for Oxford University Press independ-
ently observe that, in treating ‘α β’ and the like as singular terms, we are making a uniqueness
assumption. For example, we are assuming that, necessarily, for any thoughts α, β, taken in that
order, there is at most one thought that is their conjunction. This book could certainly be rewritten
without making that uniqueness assumption, but the reformulations of various theses and argu-
ments that this would mandate are so complex that, for readability’s sake, we think it is better to
make it.
⁸ The predicate ‘is a thought’ is actually packed into the meanings of the thought variables in a
way that we have not remarked on yet. Had we wanted to be pedantic, we would have introduced
thought variables with numerical indices with the convention that when ‘v’ is the kth thought
variable, ‘∃vϕ’ abbreviates ‘∃x(x is a thought ∧ ϕ)’ and ‘8vϕ’ abbreviates ‘8x(x is a thought ! ϕ)’,
where x is the kth first-order variable. Officially there are no thought variables in the language in
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
particularly exciting part of the theory—in fact, we hope it strikes the reader as
fairly trivial—but it is an extra-logical assumption that will do some work in the
arguments of this book.
It is worth emphasis that our assumption that some thoughts are formed by
applying some logical operations to other thoughts does not commit us to the
view that thoughts have structure in any sense more substantive than this: that
there are some thoughts α, β₁, . . . , βn, such that, for some n-place logical
operation o, α ¼ oðβ1 ; . . . ; βn Þ. This assumption is consistent, for example,
with the claims that ~~α ¼ α and α&β = β&α, just as the assumption that
some propositions are formed out of other propositions by the application of
some logical operations is consistent with a coarse-grained view of propositions
as functions from possible worlds to truth values.
Another caution is in order. We are calling the mental events of interest
‘thoughts’, and the paradigmatic thoughts, being ones we report using sentences
of the superficial form (1), are either thinkings or, if not thinkings, then at least
V-ings for some ordinary English clausal complement-taking psychological verb
‘V’ (such as ‘desire’, ‘think’, ‘judge’, and ‘know’). It might thus be tempting to
conclude that all of the mental events of interest are V-ings, for some ordinary
English clausal complement-taking psychological verb ‘V’. One should resist this
temptation. For note that Truth-Functionality entails, inter alia, that α occurs
whenever ~α does. It is clearly not the case that your believing that you are not
reading a cookbook now requires your believing that you are reading a cookbook
now. Nor does it require your thinking that you are reading a cookbook now, and
it seems to us doubtful that it requires your V-ing that you are reading a
cookbook now, for any other ordinary English psychological verb ‘V’. It seems
to us doubtful that there is, in ordinary English, any verb whose gerund form
applies to all and only the events we are calling ‘thoughts’. Perhaps ‘entertain’
comes closest to being such a verb: perhaps believing that you are not reading a
cookbook requires entertaining (the proposition) that you are reading a cook-
book, but even ‘entertain’ does not seem to be sufficiently general.⁹ We are not
particularly bothered by the apparent absence of an ordinary-English
which this book is written. For those who care about such things, all sentences containing our faux-
thought variables may be analyzed in accordance with the above contextual definitions.
⁹ One reason to doubt that ‘entertain’ would apply to all cases of thought has to do with beliefs
that are not ‘occurrent’. Suppose that you non-occurrently believe, contrary to fact (see Cheddar
Valley Gazette 2015), that it is not the case that, in October 2015, a bow-tie wearing duck walked into
a pub in Devon, drank a pint of ale, got into a fight with a dog, and lost. This seems compatible with
you never having entertained (the proposition) that, in October 2015, a bow-tie wearing duck
walked into a pub in Devon, drank a pint of ale, got into a fight with a dog, and lost.
 NARROW CONTENT
psychological verb whose gerund applies to exactly those mental events we are
interested in. Theorizing in philosophy would be severely hampered if it could
only be carried out using ordinary English or terms that can be defined in
ordinary English.
Those who do not believe in the existence of events will be made uncomfort-
able by our way of talking about the bearers of content, but we are not going to
question the existence of events here. We would hope that much of what we have
to say could be adapted to an event-free metaphysics, but we will not undertake
that project of adaptation in this book.
None of the assumptions we have made so far are particularly unusual, but it is
nevertheless good to be explicit about the framework within which one is
operating. We are aware that many readers will prefer frameworks that differ
from the bare-bones one just presented in various details, and we invite them to
work through the argumentation that follows and see where if at all those
differences matter.
1.2. Content
Our way of theorizing about content will be very much in line with standard
formal semantics for natural languages.¹⁰ The key notion is that of a function
from a configuration (sequence) of alethic parameter values to the two truth
values, Truth (T) and Falsehood (F). Most readers will be familiar with at least
one class of such functions: the functions from the (metaphysically) possible
worlds to the truth values. But we can imagine making theoretical use of
functions involving more than one alethic parameter. For example, we might
follow the framework introduced by David Kaplan in his ‘Demonstratives’
(Kaplan 1977) and associate thoughts (whereas Kaplan associates sentences-in-
contexts) with functions from pairs of worlds and times to truth values; or we
might follow David Lewis (1979) in associating thoughts with functions from
triples of worlds, times, and agents to truth values. Following one standard
nomenclature (Lewis 1980), we will call any possible configuration of values of
all of the alethic parameters an index, and we will call any function from indices
to truth values an intension. We will use ‘I’ to designate the set of all indices, and
we will use ‘i’, ‘i0 ’, ‘i00 ’, . . . as variables for indices.
Contents, whatever else they may do, determine truth values, at least relative
to indices. (That is to say, each content has a unique truth value at each index.)
¹⁰ Our paradigms are Kaplan (1977) and Lewis (1980).

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
Each content C, then, determines a function f from indices to truth values such
that, for each i ∈ I,

T if C is true at i
f ðiÞ ¼
F otherwise
This function is the intension of C. One choice point that is very important in
some theoretical contexts but less so in this book is that between a coarse-grained
and a fine-grained conception of contents. The coarse-grained conception iden-
tifies contents with their intensions, whereas on the fine-grained conception two
distinct contents may have the same intension. In what follows we will for the
most part adopt the simplifying assumption that the coarse-grained conception is
correct. Much of what we have to say would not be significantly affected by a
switch to a fine-grained approach. We will indicate where the coarse-grained/
fine-grained choice point makes a difference. Throughout we will use ‘C(i)’ to
designate the truth value the content C determines at the index i. Although the
notation is suggestive of the coarse-grained conception, it should be understood as
just defined, as neutral between the coarse-grained and fine-grained conceptions.
We said that the indices are all of the ‘possible’ configurations of all alethic
parameters—of all of the dimensions on which contents vary in truth value. The
relevant notion of possibility here is not metaphysical but combinatorial. (Think
of contents in geometric terms, so that each alethic parameter is a dimension in
alethic space,¹¹ and a content is a region—i.e., a set of points—in that space.) On
this way of thinking there is a precise sense in which I is the set of all of the
possible configurations of alethic parameters, namely this: if X1 ; . . . ; Xn are all of
the alethic parameters (taken in some fixed order; it doesn’t matter which), then
I ¼ X1 . . . Xn :
That is, I is the set of all sequences of length n whose first member is drawn from
X₁, . . . , and whose nth member is drawn from Xn. We will refer to the kth
member of an index i as ‘Xk(i)’ or ‘the Xk of i’.
(Note that, if the indices include agents, worlds, and times, then we must be
able to evaluate a thought at a particular hagent, world, timei triple even when the
agent does not exist in the world at the time. We need to be able to do this to
account for the fact that the ur-content of the thought you would express by
¹¹ To forestall any worry of metaphysical obscurity, it will serve our purposes perfectly well to
think of each dimension as a set, so that, for example, the world dimension is the set of all worlds, the
time dimension is the set of all times, and so on. The values of a parameter are just the members of
the set that is the parameter.
 NARROW CONTENT
‘It is possible that I do not exist’,¹² supposing ur-contents to have agent- and
time-relative truth values, is true. Its truth will require the constituent corres-
ponding to ‘I do not exist’ to have an ur-content that is at some index—and it will
not be true at some index unless there are indices in whose world the agent of the
index does not exist at the time of the index. See Lewis (1980: 29).)
We will assume, with semantic orthodoxy, that the set of all metaphysically
possible worlds, which we will call ‘W’, is the first alethic parameter. Thus the first
member of each index i is W(i), the world of i. On the simplest hypothesis,
I ¼ W, which is to say that an index just is its world: i ¼ WðiÞ. Although we have
opinions on the matter, throughout this book we will maintain neutrality on the
question of whether the simplest hypothesis is true.
We take the question of whether I ¼ W, and the question of what further
alethic parameters there are if I 6¼ W, to be substantive open questions about the
metaphysics of content. In contrast, some other philosophers take the position—
which we’ll call liberalism—that contents do not form anything like a natural
kind, and that the distinction between the abstract objects that are contents
and others is not especially interesting and is to be, albeit vaguely, resolved
by considering the theoretical utility of various parameters. Some of David
Chalmers’ work, for example, seems to us difficult to interpret without attributing
to him a liberal position.¹³ (One important difference between our approach
and Chalmers’ is that he identifies contents with set-theoretic entities, whereas
we use set-theoretic entities to model contents, which we take to be a different
kind of metaphysical beast: see the last paragraph of this section.) It would
make some but not much difference to our discussion if we ourselves adopted a
liberal position. We will flag in due course those places where liberalism makes
a difference.
¹² Necessitists will, of course, think that any agent is such that in every world there is something
that is identical to it. And one might well take an analogous attitude towards the temporal
dimension. However, this need not entail that everything necessarily exists or always exists, in the
ordinary sense of ‘exists’ (see Williamson 2013: §1 for further discussion). Note also that even if one
thinks that everything exists necessarily and always, one will still need to admit metaphysically
impossible configurations of parameters given certain other choices of parameters. For example, if
one includes a location parameter, then one must appeal to world-time-agent-location quadruples
where the agent is not at the location in the world at the time.
¹³ For example, Chalmers (2012: 285ff.) considers enriching the indices on which his ‘primary’ or
‘epistemic intensions’ are defined with sequences of mental demonstratives (or demonstrations, or
their referents) of arbitrary length. Although Chalmers here is concerned with the construction of
‘scenarios’ (thought of as maximally specific epistemic possibilities) out of linguistic materials, for
his primary intension assignment to be truth-conditional (in the sense of §1.4), as he intends, he
must posit a space of indices corresponding to the scenarios, in which each index consists of at least a
world, an agent, a time, and a sequence of mental demonstratives (or something similar). This idea is
very close to the proposal we call extension assignment relativism in §2.4.
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
Note that, even though on our way of thinking all contents are defined on the
same space of indices, this does not prevent us from recognizing contents whose
truth values are relative to different parameters: e.g., some whose truth values are
only world-relative—like Chalmers’ ‘secondary intensions’—and others whose
truth values are relative to worlds, agents, and times—like (some of) Chalmers’
‘primary intensions’. On our way of thinking each content of the former kind will
determine the same truth value at any two indices that have the same world,
whereas no content of the latter kind will do so. There is nothing unusual about
the practice of allowing contents to differ with respect to the parameters their
truth values are relative to—in fact, it is standard practice in formal semantics.
For example, according to the theory of Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’,¹⁴ contents are
functions from world-time pairs to truth values, but Kaplan’s theory associates
some sentences (such as sentences of the form ‘Actually ϕ’) with contents whose
truth values are independent of the world parameter, others (such as sentences of
the form ‘Now ϕ’) with contents whose truth values are independent of the time
parameter, and yet others (such as sentences of the form ‘Actually now ϕ’) with
contents whose truth values are independent of both.
We will assume that one constraint on the kinds of things indices can be is that
there should be a natural way of associating each thought α with a unique index
iα, the index of α. The main motivation for this constraint comes from our further
assumption that ur-content assignment necessarily assigns to each thought a
content that determines, at the index of the thought, the truth value of the
thought. That is, if ⟦.⟧ is the ur-content assignment, then
h 8α⟦α⟧ðiα Þ ¼ jαj,
i.e., necessarily, for all thoughts α, the truth value of the content ⟦α⟧ at the index
of α is the truth value of α. (This condition says, in terminology that we will later
adopt, that the ur-content assignment is truth-conditional.) Suppose that
I ¼ X1 . . . Xn . It is then appropriate to require—and we do require—that
there should be some natural sense in which, necessarily, for each thought α there
is such a thing as the Xi of α (or Xi(α)), and to identify Xi(α) with Xi(iα). Then
iα ¼ hX1 ðαÞ; . . . ; Xn ðαÞi:
Thus, for example, if the indices are all the sets of triples of worlds, agents, and
times, then, necessarily, for each thought α, iα = hthe world of α, the agent of α,
the time of αi, there should be some natural sense in which each thought has a
world, an agent, and a time. And there is such a natural sense.
¹⁴ Kaplan (1977).
 NARROW CONTENT
The case of the agent parameter is straightforward. The agent A(α) of α is the
agent whose thought α is. The case of the time parameter is also straightforward in
the case of instantaneous thoughts. The time T(α) of a thought α is the time at which
α occurs. Tricky issues arise when it comes to providing a time for logically complex
thoughts that take time to occur, especially in cases where different parts of the
thought require evaluation at different times (which one of us has written about
elsewhere¹⁵). These tricky issues will not matter, however, for the discussion here.
The world W(α) of a thought α is the world in which α occurs. However, we are
not assuming that thoughts are ‘world-bound’ in the sense that no thought could
occur in more than one world. (Similarly, we are open to the possibility that a
thought could occur at a different time than it actually does.) In fact, we assume
that some of our thoughts still would have occurred even if things had gone
slightly differently (so, we assume that thoughts are not world-bound). On our
view, while it is necessary that all thoughts have the same world—in particular,
the shared world of all actual thoughts is the actual world—for no thought α and
for no world w, is it necessarily that w ¼ WðαÞ. In fact, we are happy to allow that
each thought is such that it would still have occurred if things had gone
differently in certain ways. In summary, we affirm:
h8α 8β WðαÞ ¼ WðβÞ

(Necessarily, all thoughts occur in the same world.)
But we are happy to deny:
∃w ∃α hðα occurs ! w ¼ WðαÞÞ

(Some world and some thought are such that, necessarily, if the thought.
occurs, then it occurs in that world.)
The association of each thought with its world is a contingent fact: if things had
gone differently, a world other than the actual world would have obtained, and
that world would have been the shared world of all of those actual thoughts that
would have then occurred.
Further candidates for alethic parameters will be discussed in §2. For each of
the further candidates, too, there will be a natural way of associating each thought
(in each world) with its parameter value.¹⁶
¹⁵ See Yli-Vakkuri (MS).

¹⁶ It is difficult to theorize about indices without assuming that, necessarily, anything that is a
value of any parameter actually exists—at least in the minimal sense of actually being identical to
something—so we do assume this. In fact, it is difficult to do any modal theorizing without assuming
the thesis Williamson (2013) calls necessitism: that, necessarily, everything is necessarily something
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
Now suppose that I ¼ W. Then it is straightforward to talk about ‘the truth

value’ of a content: it will be the truth value determined by the content at the
actual world. (Of course, a content’s having that truth value may be a contingent
matter. If a certain other world had obtained, the truth value of the content would
have been the value of the content at that world.) When other parameters come
into play, matters are trickier. Suppose, for example, that each index has an agent
and a world parameter. It may still be straightforward to speak of the truth value
of a thought, but what would it mean to speak of the truth value of a content?
There are two options here. We may start speaking of the truth value of the
content relative to an agent. Alternatively, we may still persist in speaking of
the truth value of a content simpliciter, but in doing so we will be exploiting the
fact that we are particular agents: a judgment to the effect that a certain content is
true, made by a particular agent such as you, will be evaluated as having the truth
value that that content has at the index of your judgment. Similarly, mutatis
mutandis, with any other parameter, provided that—as we assume is the case—it
is necessary that each thought supplies a unique value for each parameter.
In setting things out as we have, we admit to indulging in a certain amount of
idealization. There are arguably too many worlds to form a set, and so our talk of the
‘set of all possible worlds’ would have to be dropped in a fully perspicuous account.
For related reasons, it might be wrong to think of contents (or even the intensions
determined by them) as belonging to the universe of set-theoretic entities. For
example, the universe of functions-cum-sets is arguably too small to provide a
distinct representative for each content (or its intension).¹⁷ While the set-theoretic
approach is therefore something of a fantasy, we hope that there will be relatively
little distortion when it comes to the topics at hand if we indulge in it. While doing so
may sacrifice some theoretical precision, it will have the virtue of operating in a
framework that is both a standard and familiar one for theorizing about content.
(formally: h8 x h∃y x ¼ y), and the corresponding theses at all higher orders (schematically:
h8 V h∃V*V V*, where ‘V ’ and ‘V*’ may be replaced by any variables of the same order and
type, and ‘’ is whatever—perhaps contextually defined—expression corresponds to identity at the
appropriate order). We assume first- and higher-order necessitism throughout this book. Readers
who accept contingentism (i.e., reject necessitism) at any order relevant to our discussion are invited
to attempt to find contingentist paraphrases of the various things we say that presuppose necessit-
ism. We ourselves do not feel an urgent need to come up with such paraphrases, because it is as yet
unclear how, if at all, one can produce acceptable contingentist paraphrases of even perfectly
ordinary modal claims that appear to quantify over things that, by the contingentist’s lights, are
not there to be quantified over (e.g., ‘Four knives could have been made by combining these two
handles and these two blades’). See Fine (2017), Williamson (2017a), and Fritz and Goodman
(2017), for a sample of the most recent work on this difficult problem.
¹⁷ See Williamson (2003).
 NARROW CONTENT
1.3. Narrowness
We will begin by introducing the notion of a content assignment. Let us say that
a content assignment is any function ⟦.⟧ such that, necessarily, for all thoughts
α, ⟦α⟧ is a content and, for all non-thoughts x, ⟦x⟧ is undefined. (For those who,
like us, are not fans of free logic, ‘is undefined’ can mean, for example, ‘is some
arbitrarily selected non-content’.) Versions of ‘⟦.⟧’, embellished with primes
and other diacritics as needed (e.g., ‘⟦.⟧0 ’, ‘⟦.⟧*’, ‘⟦.⟧{’), will be used as variables
for content assignments, and ⟦α⟧ will be called the ⟦.⟧-content of α. We will
use ‘⟦w; α⟧’ as an abbreviation for ‘the content C such that, in w, C ¼ ⟦α⟧’,
and generally, whenever ‘f ’ is an n-place function symbol, we will use
‘f ðw; x1 ; . . . ; xn Þ’ as an abbreviation for ‘the y such that, in w, y ¼ f ðx1 ; . . . ; xn Þ’.
By ‘function’ above and elsewhere in this book we mean a function in intension
rather than a function in the standard set-theoretic sense, i.e., a set of sequences
of a fixed length n + 1 no two of which have the same n first members. Because set
membership is a non-contingent matter, functions in the latter sense associate
values with arguments non-contingently, whereas functions in our sense obvi-
ously do not always do so. An n-place function in intension is an n-place relation
R such that, necessarily, the extension of R (i.e., the set of sequences that stand in
the relation R) is a function in the standard set-theoretic sense.
We will think of narrowness as a property of content assignments. The basic
idea is that a content assignment ⟦.⟧ is narrow just in case the value of ⟦.⟧ for a
thought is determined (in the sense of strong local supervenience) by the
maximal way in which the thought relates to the way the agent of the thought
is in intrinsic, qualitative respects. We will call the maximal way in which a
thought so relates to its agent its qualitative agential profile (QAP).
Let us flesh this out a little. Obviously the QAP of a thought is not, at least
typically, an intrinsic property of the thought. Many aspects of a thought’s QAP
have to do with relations to parts of the agent, and to events occurring in the
agent, that are external to that thought. (Analogously, the qualitative house profile of
a brick that is part of a house is not an intrinsic property of the brick.) Nor will the
QAP of a thought be an intrinsic property of the agent, for the simple reason that it
is not a property of the agent at all. Being a way in which the thought relates to the
agent, a QAP is a way for a thought to be, i.e., a property of a thought.¹⁸ The concept
of an intrinsic relation is helpful here. Just as an intrinsic one-place property
concerns how an object is in itself, quite apart from how it relates to things external
¹⁸ We are helping ourselves to the perhaps false idealization that, necessarily, every thought is a
thought of exactly one agent.
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
to it, an intrinsic two-place relation concerns how a pair of things relate to each
other, quite apart from how they relate to things external to them. Take the
strongest qualitative intrinsic relation R that holds between a thought and its
agent. The QAP of that thought will be the property of being R-related to some-
thing. More precisely, let us define the QAP(α) of a thought α as the conjunction of
all properties P satisfying, for some relation Q, each of (i)–(iii) below.¹⁹,²⁰
(i) P ¼ λx∃yQðx; yÞ²¹
(ii) Qðα; AðαÞÞ
(iii) Q is intrinsic and qualitative
Here (i) says that P is the property of being Q-related to something, and (ii) that
the thought α is Q-related to its agent. We will say that thoughts having the same
QAP are agential duplicates. (We will also sometimes use the one-place predicate
¹⁹ In an earlier draft, we deployed an unsuccessful definition based on the idea that a property P
of a thought concerns just how the thought relates to its agent in intrinsic qualitative respects iff it is
intrinsic to the agent of the thought that it has some thought or other with P. Cian Dorr pointed out
to us that this idea is fundamentally incorrect. Consider an agent with a finite number of thoughts.
No matter how that agent is embedded in the world, it will have the property of having a thought α
such that no other thought occurs closer to a baboon than α. Thus, since every possible duplicate of
the agent has that property, it is, at least on the duplication-theoretic approach to intrinsicality, an
intrinsic property of that agent. But the property of being at least as close as any other thought to a
baboon is not a property that concerns just how a thought relates to the agent.
²⁰ A last-minute conversation with Jeremy Goodman convinced us that we do not, after all, need
to treat the notion of an intrinsic relation as one of the primitives in terms of which we define
narrowness. (That said, we are still happy enough with the presentation in the text, since we see
nothing deeply problematic about the notion of an intrinsic relation.) Here is a sketch of Goodman’s
suggestion. First, let us say that x plays the same role in y as x0 plays in y0 iff x is part of y, x0 is part
of y0 , and there is a parthood-preserving bijection f between the parts of y and the parts of y0 such
that f(z) is a duplicate of z for all parts z of y, and f ðxÞ ¼ x0 . Let us also say that a property P is
thought-agent intrinsic iff it never divides thoughts α and α0 such that, for some duplicate agents x
and x0 , α plays the same role in x as α0 plays in x0 . Finally, let us say that two thoughts have the same
QAP just in case they have the same qualitative thought-agent intrinsic properties. This definition,
of course, does not yet tell us what it takes for a thought in one world to have the same QAP as a
thought in another, but it is a straightforward matter (and a mouthful, so we omit it) to generalize
the first definition to a definition of ‘x plays the same role in y in world w as x0 plays in y0 in world w0 ’
and to define ‘α has the same QAP in w as α0 does in w0 ’. The Goodman-inspired definition requires
one to think of events internal to an agent (in particular, thoughts) as parts of the agent. If one is not
happy to think of internal events in this way, one can replace ‘part of ’ with ‘part of or an event
occurring inside’ (and find some suitable replacement for ‘parthood-preserving’).
²¹ Identity for properties can be defined as the sharing of all second-order properties, i.e., ‘P ¼ Q’
can be taken as an abbreviation for
8XðXðPÞ $ XðQÞÞ;
where ‘X ’ ranges over properties of properties. For now we leave it an open question whether this is
equivalent to the conception of property identity as necessary coextensiveness, i.e.,
P ¼ Q $ h8xðPðxÞ $ QðxÞÞ:
 NARROW CONTENT
‘is a QAP’, as opposed to the two-place predicate ‘is the QAP of ’. The one-place
predicate is shorthand for ‘is possibly the QAP of some thought or other’.)
Let us say that x and y are duplicates just in case x and y have exactly the same
qualitative intrinsic properties. One desirable feature of our definition of QAP is
that it has the consequence that thoughts α and β are agential duplicates only if
the agents of α and β are duplicates.²² (It also entails the stronger principle that
if the QAP α has in world w = the QAP β has in world v, then the agent of α in w
is a duplicate of the agent of β in v—in the sense that, for all qualitative intrinsic
properties P, the agent of α has P in w iff the agent of β has P in v.) The converse
of this principle does not follow, nor should it. Just as there is no guarantee that a pair
of bricks belonging to duplicate houses will occupy the same structural positions in
their respective houses, there is no guarantee that two thoughts belonging to dupli-
cate agents will be related in the same way to their respective agents.
We will not theorize at length about what it is for a property or relation to be
intrinsic. Like many others theorizing in this terrain, we are guided by paradigms,
but we do not have any definition to offer. For example, standing next to a
baboon is a paradigmatically extrinsic property, and the relation of being separ-
ated by a wall is a paradigmatically extrinsic relation. Meanwhile, being spherical
is a paradigmatically intrinsic property, and duplication is a paradigmatically
intrinsic relation.
At least when it comes to qualitative properties, we agree with Lewis that there
is an intimate connection between the ideology of intrinsicality and that of
duplication:²³ it would be absurd to suppose that two objects are duplicates and
yet differ with respect to some intrinsic qualitative property. In the literature one
finds two somewhat inchoate ways of thinking about intrinsicality. One takes
intrinsicality to be straightforwardly interdefinable with duplication. Another
identifies intrinsic properties with those that are ‘grounded in facts about the
inside’ of their bearer.²⁴ The first conception prohibits non-qualitative properties,
such as being identical to Juhani, from counting as intrinsic, since something that
is not identical to Juhani can duplicate something that is (on this conception the
‘qualitative’ in our ‘qualitative intrinsic’ is redundant). The second conception
²² Suppose that α and β are agential duplicates, and let Pα be the conjunction of all of A(α)’s
qualitative intrinsic properties. Clearly, to be a duplicate of A(α) is to have Pα. Also clearly, the
relation λx,y(x occurs in y ∧ Pα(y))—the relation in which any things x, y stand iff x occurs in y and
y has Pα—is a property satisfying conditions (i)–(iii) of the definition of QAP, so, any agential
duplicate of α has λy∃x(x occurs in y ∧ Pα(y)). Since any agential duplicate of α has λy∃x(x occurs in
y ∧ Pα(y)), and β is an agential duplicate of α, A(β) has Pα, so A(α) and A(β) are duplicates.
²³ Of course, above we defined duplicates as things that have exactly the same qualitative intrinsic
properties. Lewis, in his early work, takes duplication as primitive, but see Langton and Lewis (1998).
²⁴ For a critical discussion of the grounding idea, see Marshall (2015).
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
can be more tolerant of intrinsic non-qualitative properties, since Juhani’s being

identical to Juhani seems more grounded in facts about his inside than in facts
about his outside. We will remain neutral about this somewhat obscure dispute.
(We will return to these issues in §5.)
The topic of intrinsic relations is much less discussed in the literature on
intrinsicality. Those who wish to allow external intrinsic relations²⁵ cannot think
that an intrinsic relation between x and y will be preserved by any pair x0 and y0
such that x0 is a duplicate of x and y0 is a duplicate of y. Versions of the
duplication idea suitable for intrinsic relations might proceed by some version
of the admittedly rough idea that patterns of the relevant relations will be
preserved across duplicates of fusions of the relata.²⁶ But exploring the relative
merits of various candidate definitions, including grounding-theoretic ones,
would take us too far afield, and so we will treat the notion of intrinsic relation
as primitive relative to our discussion. However, when it comes to an intrinsic
relation in which a part stands to a whole, it is particularly easy to get an intuitive
grip on what we are after: if R is an intrinsic relation of this sort, then, so to speak,
God could figure out whether any particular part stands in R to the whole merely
by examining the inside of the whole. And in the case of qualitative intrinsic
relations, a divine inspection of the qualitative profile of the inside will suffice.
Like our use of ‘intrinsic’, our use of ‘qualitative’ is guided by paradigms, and
we have no definition to offer. Being identical to Trump is a paradigmatically
non-qualitative property; being square and pink is a paradigmatically qualitative
property.
We are happy to concede that the credentials of each concept are far from
flawless. Concerning qualitativeness, initially compelling contrasts may collapse
under scrutiny. For example, it is often thought that being located in a certain
place—say, London—is paradigmatically non-qualitative, but having a determin-
ate mass is paradigmatically qualitative. However, once we think of determinate
mass as a matter of occupying a particular location in mass space, the force of the
contrast disappears. Concerning intrinsicality, it is often assumed that having a
determinate mass is intrinsic, but if that consists in having a relation to a location
in mass space, or standing in a certain relation to a Platonic form that is not part
²⁵ That is, ones such that the holding of the relation between x and y doesn’t supervene on the
intrinsic properties of x and the intrinsic properties of y taken together.
²⁶ Langton and Lewis (1998) rely not on the duplication idea but, at a first pass, on the idea that
intrinsic properties and relations are independent of loneliness and accompaniment. (In the case of a
binary relation the relevant dependence is on whether there is a third thing that does not overlap
either of the relata.) They then need extra machinery to control for disjunctive properties and
relations. For example, the relation of being either both red or accompanied by a baboon is plausibly
independent of loneliness and accompaniment but is not intuitively intrinsic.
 NARROW CONTENT
of one, or standing in certain mass-congruence and mass-between relations to

other objects, the status of the paradigm becomes questionable.²⁷ Of course, one
may take these examples not to make trouble for the categories of qualitativeness
and intrinsicality but instead for particular judgments about how they apply, but,
in the absence of definitions, enough considerations like these might be taken to
challenge the meaningfulness of the notions themselves, or at least to suggest that
they are too vague to be theoretically useful. We are not going to press these
challenges in this book. In not doing so we are being concessive to the friends of
narrow content, because it is they, not us, who need the notions of intrinsicality
and qualitativeness. Even narrow content-lovers who do not use the language of
intrinsicality or qualitativeness explicitly must make implicit use of these notions.
For example, a philosopher who says that the narrow content of a thought is
determined by the physical state of the agent (together, presumably, with the way
in which the thought relates to that physical state) means to exclude both
extrinsic and non-qualitative physical properties of the agent from its physical
state. For such a philosopher must think that, in a standard Twin Earth scenario,
an agent and its duplicate are in the same physical state in the relevant sense of
‘physical state’, but clearly, in such a scenario, the agent and its duplicate differ
with respect to many extrinsic physical properties—e.g., their distance from the
centre of mass of the universe—and with respect to many non-qualitative
physical properties—e.g., being made up of these very atoms. Similarly, mutatis
mutandis, for philosophers who replace ‘physical state’ with ‘phenomenal state’,
with ‘phenomenal and physical state’, or with anything else.
To return to the main thread of discussion, we will say that a content
assignment ⟦.⟧ is narrow just in case it satisfies the following condition.
h8α8Q8CððQAPðαÞ ¼ Q ∧ ⟦α⟧ ¼ CÞ ! h8βðQAPðβÞ ¼ Q ! ⟦β⟧ ¼ CÞÞ,
i.e., necessarily, if a thought with a certain QAP, Q, has a certain ⟦.⟧-content, C,

then, necessarily, any thought whose QAP is Q has C as its ⟦.⟧-content. Expressed
equivalently in the language of possible worlds, the definition says that ⟦.⟧ is
narrow just in case ⟦w; α⟧ ¼ ⟦v; β⟧ whenever QAPðw; αÞ ¼ QAPðv; βÞ, i.e., that
sameness of QAP in a pair of worlds guarantees sameness of ⟦.⟧-content in that
same pair of worlds.
²⁷ And if the mass of a thing changes there is pressure from a different source. One might in that
case think of the relevant mass properties as relations to times (or space-time regions) and then in
turn think of this relationality as incompatible with intrinsicality. (We are well aware of course that a
temporal part-lover can instead hold that fundamental mass properties never change—what we call
change in mass is a matter of having a variety of temporal parts, each with a uniform mass profile.)
WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 
Narrowness, as just defined, is a species of strong local supervenience. Accord-

ing to established usage, a class of properties X strongly locally supervenes on a
class of properties Y just in case sameness of Y-properties in a pair of worlds
guarantees sameness of X-properties in that same pair of worlds. The superven-
ing class of properties in this case are the ⟦.⟧-content properties—i.e., all of the
properties of the form to be an α such that ⟦α⟧ ¼ C—and the class of properties
they supervene on are the QAPs. According to our definition, ⟦.⟧ is narrow just in
case ⟦.⟧-properties strongly locally supervene on QAPs.
It is worth pointing out why we chose this definition rather than one according
to which ⟦.⟧ is narrow just in case ⟦.⟧-properties strongly globally supervene on
QAPs. According to standard usage, a class of properties X strongly globally
supervenes on a class of properties Y just in case, for all worlds w, v, every
bijection from the things that exist in w to the things that exist in v that preserves
all the Y-properties also preserves all the X-properties. According to a definition
of narrowness as strong global supervenience on QAPs, a content assignment ⟦.⟧
would be narrow iff, for all worlds w, v, every bijection from the thoughts that
occur in w to the thoughts that occur in v that preserves all QAPs also preserves
all ⟦.⟧-content properties. Let us call this notion global narrowness. To see
why global narrowness cannot do the theoretical work we need our notion
of narrowness to do, consider a pair of worlds w, v, such that exactly two
thoughts, α, β, occur in w and exactly one thought, γ, occurs in v, and
QAPðw; αÞ ¼ QAPðw; βÞ ¼ QAPðv; γÞ, and consider a content assignment ⟦.⟧
such that ⟦w; α⟧ ¼ ⟦w; β⟧ 6¼ ⟦v; γ⟧. (E.g., let v contain Oscar on Earth and no
other agents, and let w contain Oscar—in qualitative intrinsic respects exactly as
he is in v—on Earth and Twin Oscar on Twin Earth and no other agents, and let
⟦.⟧ assign to Oscar’s ‘Water is wet’ thought in v, which is his only thought in v,
the proposition that water is wet, and to each of the corresponding thoughts in w
the proposition that there are no green baboons.²⁸) Suppose furthermore that
whenever the same number of thoughts occur in a pair of worlds u, u0 , ⟦.⟧ assigns
the same content to a thought occurring in u as to a thought occurring in u0 if the
thoughts have the same QAP in u and in u0 . ⟦.⟧ is not narrow by our definition—
and it is not intuitively narrow—but ⟦.⟧ is globally narrow, because there are no
bijections between sets of different sizes.
We will also use ‘narrow’ as a term for a property of properties and relations
other than content assignments. A narrow property is one that strongly locally
²⁸ As an anonymous reader for Oxford University Press notes, the scenario described here is
likely metaphysically impossible. The point could be made with more elaborate examples that are
clearly metaphysically possible, but they will involve more than three thoughts.
 NARROW CONTENT
supervenes on QAPs. That is to say, a property P is narrow iff P satisfies the

following condition
h8α8QððQAPðαÞ ¼ Q ∧ PðαÞÞ ! h8βðQAPðβÞ ¼ Q ! PðβÞÞÞ
i.e., necessarily, if a thought with a certain QAP, Q, has property P, then,

necessarily, any thought whose QAP is Q also has P. Expressed equivalently in
the language of possible worlds, the definition says that P is narrow just in case
Pðw; αÞ iff Pðv; βÞ whenever QAPðw; αÞ ¼ QAP ðv; βÞ, i.e., that sameness of
QAP in a pair of worlds guarantees sameness with respect to P in that same
pair of worlds.
As we have noted, our notions of narrowness are species of strong local
supervenience—namely, strong local supervenience on QAPs. Strong local super-
venience is standardly distinguished from weak local supervenience. According
to standard usage, a class of properties X weakly locally supervenes on a class of
properties Y iff, necessarily, any things that have the same Y-properties also have
the same X-properties. We will say that a content assignment ⟦.⟧ is weakly
narrow iff ⟦.⟧-properties weakly supervene on QAPs, i.e., iff, necessarily, for
all agential duplicate thoughts α, β, ⟦α⟧ ¼ ⟦β⟧. The strong supervenience of
X-properties on Y-properties entails the weak supervenience of X-properties on
Y-properties. Since the falsity of a weak local supervenience thesis entails the
falsity of the corresponding strong local supervenience thesis, a refutation of the
claim that a given content assignment is weakly narrow is ipso facto a refutation
of the claim that it is narrow. In this book we will make extensive use of this fact.
So far we have only said what it is for a property to be narrow. We will now
generalize this notion to relations of arbitrary adicity. An n-adic relation R is
narrow—somewhat roughly speaking—iff whether an n-tuple of thoughts instan-
tiates R strongly locally supervenes on the QAPs of those thoughts. Less roughly
speaking, R is narrow iff R satisfies the following condition:
h8α1 ...8αn 8Q1 ...8Qn ððhQAPðα1 Þ;...;QAPðαn Þi¼hQ1 ;...;Qn i∧Rðα1 ;...;αn ÞÞ!
h8β1 ...8βn ðhQAPðβ1 Þ;...;QAPðβn Þi¼hQ1 ;...;Qn i!Rðβ1 ;...;βn ÞÞÞ:
That is, R is narrow iff, necessarily, any n-tuple of thoughts that have certain
QAPs, Q₁, . . . , Qn, and instantiates R is such that, necessarily, any n-tuple of
thoughts that have Q₁, . . . , Qn as their QAPs also instantiate R. An n-adic relation
R is weakly narrow iff R satisfies the condition:
h8α1 . . .8αn 8Q1 . . .8Qn ððQAPðα1 Þ ¼ QAPðβ1 Þ∧. . .∧QAPðαn Þ ¼ QAPðβn ÞÞ

! ðRðα1 ; . . . ; αn Þ $ Rðβ1 ; . . . ; βn ÞÞÞ,
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She remained there a long time, so long that Mrs. Rose wondered
what the ladies could have to say to each other. And when at last
Mabin, who was watching at the drawing-room window for her return,
called out that she was coming up the garden, the girl added: “Oh,
mamma, how pale she looks!”
“She is tired, no doubt,” said Mrs. Rose, as she left the room to
meet her friend as the latter came in.
But she also was surprised to see how white Mrs. Haybrow had
grown.
“You should have waited until after dinner. You look quite worn
out,” she said. “Well, and what had your friend got to say to you?”
Mrs. Haybrow paused, as if too much exhausted to answer at
once. Then she said quietly:
“I was mistaken. She was not my friend after all.”
“Not your friend! Dear me! You were so long gone that we were
quite sure she was.”
“No. She is very nice, though, quite a charming woman.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Rose suspiciously. “But what do you think
about her having Mabin?”
There was another slight pause before Mrs. Haybrow answered: “I
am sure you may be quite satisfied about that.”
But when dinner was over, Mrs. Haybrow got Mabin to take her to
see the new ducks that Mr. Rose was so proud of; and on the way
back she asked the girl whether she was very anxious for her visit to
“The Towers.” And finding that she was, Mrs. Haybrow added:
“And of course, dear, if anything were to happen while you were
there, which seemed to you rather strange or unusual, you would
write or telegraph to papa and mamma, at once, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course. I see,” went on Mabin, smiling, “that mamma has
managed to infect you already with her own suspicions of poor Mrs.
Dale.”
“No, dear, she seemed to me a very nice woman indeed, and very
anxious to have you. But I am getting old, and I am nervous about
girls away from their homes. That is all.”
And she turned the conversation to another subject.
CHAPTER V.
A STARTLING VISIT.
Mrs. Rose was not a woman of acute perceptions, but even she
was vaguely conscious that there was something not quite
satisfactory about the account Mrs. Haybrow had given of her visit to
“The Towers.”
Surely it was very strange that, after being so sure that Mrs. Dale
was an old friend of hers, she should have discovered that she was
mistaken! And again, if the pretty widow had really proved to be a
stranger, why should Mrs. Haybrow, tired as she was after her
journey, have stayed at “The Towers” so long?
And besides, Mrs. Rose could not help thinking that she had heard
some name like “Dolly Leatham” before, although she had forgotten
that it was from the lips of Mrs. Bonnington, and that it had been part
of the backstairs gossip which Mr. Rose would have been angry with
her for encouraging.
Mrs. Rose was a person in whose mind few facts long remained in
a definite shape. Accustomed to have all mental processes
performed for her by her husband, she lived in a state of intellectual
laziness, in which her faculties had begun to rust. Mr. Rose had
complete confidence in Mrs. Haybrow, who was indeed a staid, solid
sort of person who inspired trust. If, therefore, Mr. Rose trusted to
Mrs. Haybrow’s judgment, and Mrs. Haybrow saw no objection to
Mabin’s visit, surely there was no need to fatigue one’s self by
hunting out obstacles to a very convenient arrangement.
And so it fell out that, when Mrs. Haybrow’s visit was over, and the
Roses started for Switzerland, Mabin saw them all off at the station,
and then returned to “Stone House,” to pack up the few things she
had left out which she would want during her stay at “The Towers.”
She had reached the portico, and was going up the steps of her
home with leisurely steps, rather melancholy at the partings which
had been gone through, and with a few girlish fears about her visit,
when the door of the house was opened suddenly before she could
ring the bell, and the parlormaid, one of the two servants who, at the
request of the new tenant, had been left behind, appeared, with her
finger to her lips.
Mabin stopped on the top step and looked at her with surprise.
Langton came out, and spoke in a whisper:
“Shall I pack up your things, and send them in to Mrs. Dale’s to-
night, Miss Mabin? Mr. Banks has come, and he seems such a
queer sort of gentleman, I don’t quite know how to take him yet. He
came upon us quite sudden, almost as soon as the ’bus with the
luggage had turned the corner, and asked sharp-like, if they were all
gone. And I said ‘Yes,’ and he seemed relieved like, and so I didn’t
dare to mention you were coming back to fetch your things.”
Mabin stared gloomily at Langford, who was evidently anxious to
get rid of her.
“What’s the matter with him? Do you think it is Mr. Banks, and not
some man who’s got into the house by pretending to be he?”
“Lor’, Miss Mabin, I never thought of that!” cried poor Langford,
turning quite white.
She had evidently entertained faint suspicions of her own, for at
this suggestion she was about to fly into the house in search of the
new-comer, and perhaps to brand him as an impostor, when Mabin,
smiling at her alarm, caught hold of her to detain her.
“No, no, you silly girl. Of course it’s all right. It’s sure to be all right.
He’s probably eccentric, that’s all. Doesn’t he look the kind of person
you would expect?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Mabin, he’s every inch a gentleman. But—” She
hesitated, apparently unable to put into appropriate words the
impression the new tenant had made upon her.
“But what?”
“He is rather—rather strange-looking. I—I think he looks as if he
wouldn’t live long. His face has a sort of gray look, as if— Well, Miss
Mabin, it’s a queer thing to say, but he looks to me half-scared.”
“Mad?” suggested Mabin, more with her lips and eyebrows than
with her voice.
Langford nodded emphatically.
“Oh, dear!”
Then Mabin was silent, trying to recollect all that she had heard in
the family circle about the gentleman who was so anxious to take the
house. And she found that it did not amount to much. A rich man, a
bachelor, of quiet habits, who disliked unnecessary fuss and noise,
and whose references Mr. Rose’s lawyer had declared to be
unimpeachable—this was the sum of the family knowledge of Mr.
Banks.
“Did he come quite alone?” asked Mabin, in spite of the mute
entreaties of Langford that she would take herself off.
“Yes, Miss Mabin, quite alone. And he said his luggage would be
sent on.”
After a short pause, during which Mabin made up her mind that
there was nothing to be done but to accept the new-comer as the
genuine article until he proved to be an impostor, she turned
reluctantly to go.
“Good-by, Langford. Bring me my things, and mind you don’t
forget to feed my canary. And you might come and see me
sometimes in the evening, when you can get away. I think I shall be
lonely.”
And indeed there were tears in the eyes of the girl, who was
already homesick now that she found herself thus suddenly denied
admittance at the familiar portal.
It was in a very sober and chastened mood that the young girl
arrived, a few minutes later, at the gate of “The Towers,” but the
welcome she received would have put heart into a misanthrope.
Mrs. Dale was waiting in the garden, her pretty, fair face aglow
with impatience to receive her friend. She drew the arm of Mabin,
who was considerably taller than herself, through hers, and led her
at once into the house, to the room which Mabin had been in before.
The table was laid for luncheon, and Mabin observed with surprise
that there were two places ready, although she had not promised to
come till the afternoon.
“There!” cried Mrs. Dale, triumphantly, pointing to the table, “was I
not inspired? The fact is,” she went on, with a smile which was
almost tearful, “I was so anxious for you to come that I had begun to
tell myself that I should be disappointed after all, so I had your place
laid to ‘make believe,’ like the children. And now you are really here.
Oh, it seems too good to be true!”
Mabin was pleased by this reception, as she could not fail to be,
but she was also a little puzzled. She was conscious of no
attractions in herself which could explain such enthusiasm on her
account.
“I am afraid,” she said shyly, “that I shall turn out a bitter
disappointment. You can’t know much about girls, Mrs. Dale, or you
would feel, as they all do at home, that there is a time, which I am
going through now, when a girl is just as awkward and as stupid and
as generally undesirable as she can possibly be.”
“Hush, hush, child! You don’t know anything about it. Don’t you
know that girls are charming, and that part of their charm lies in that
very belief that they are ‘all wrong,’ when as a matter of fact they are
everything that is right?”
“Ah! You were never gawky and awkward!”
“I wasn’t tall enough to be gawky, as you like to call yourself. But
five years ago, when I was eighteen, I was just as miserable as you
try to make yourself, believing myself to be in everybody’s way. It led
to awful consequences in my case,” added Mrs. Dale, the excitement
going quite suddenly out of her face and voice, and giving place to a
look and tone of dull despair. Mabin, who had been made to take off
her hat, put her hand in that of the little widow.
“Come and see if you like your room,” said Mrs. Dale, springing
quickly toward the door, with a rapid change of manner. “I must tell
you frankly I am afraid you won’t, because this place has been
constructed haphazard, without any regard to the comfort or
convenience of the unfortunate people who have to live in it. Every
fireplace is so placed that the chimney must smoke whichever way
the wind is, and every window is specially adapted to let in the rain,
when there is any, and the wind, when there isn’t.”
Mrs. Dale led the way as she spoke from the dining-room, and
Mabin followed.
Mrs. Dale certainly exaggerated the defects of the house, but that
it was inconvenient could not be denied. The side nearest to the
road, where the dining-room was, had once been the whole house. It
had a basement, and out of the warren of small rooms of which it
had once consisted, a fairly large hall and a few fair-sized rooms had
been made.
The newer but not very new portion of the house had no
basement, and it was by a short flight of steps that you descended
from the hall into the drawing-room, and by another short flight that
you ascended to the bedroom floor. Here the same irregularity was
apparent. A corridor ran through the house from end to end on this
floor, broken where the new part joined the old by half a dozen steep
steps.
It was to a bedroom on the higher level at the old end of the house
that Mrs. Dale conducted Mabin.
“Why, it’s a lovely room!” cried the girl, surprised to find herself in a
big, low-ceilinged corner room lighted by three windows, and looking
out, on one side, to the road, with a view of fields and sea beyond,
and on the other to the garden at the back of the house, where
apple-trees and gooseberry-bushes and the homely potato occupied
the chief space, while the nooks were filled with the fragrant flowers
of cottage gardens, with sweet-william and sweet-pea, mignonette
and wallflower.
“Do you really think so? I’m so glad. I went over to Seagate the
other day and got some cretonne for the curtains and the easy-chair.
The old chintz there was in the room would have given you the
nightmare.”
Mabin had not recovered from her first impression of astonishment
and admiration. The dingy dining-room, with its mahogany and
horsehair, had not prepared her for this. A beautiful rug lay in front of
the fireplace, which was filled with a fresh green fern.
“This will be put in the corridor outside at night,” Mrs. Dale was
careful to explain.
The hangings of the little brass bedstead were of cretonne with a
pattern of gray-green birds and white flowers on a pale pink ground:
these hangings were trimmed with lace of a deep cream tint. The
rest of the furniture was enamelled white, with the exception of a
dainty Japanese writing-table in one window, and a low wicker arm-
chair in another.
But it was not so much in these things as in the care and taste with
which all the accessories had been chosen, the silver candlesticks
and tray on the dressing-table, the little Sèvres suit on the
mantelpiece, that a lavish and luxurious hand was betrayed. Mabin’s
delighted admiration made Mrs. Dale smile, and then suddenly burst
into tears.
“Don’t look at me, don’t trouble your head about me, child,” she
cried, as she turned away her head to wipe her eyes. “It was my
vanity, the vanity I can’t get rid of, that made me want to show you I
know how to make things pretty and nice. I made the excuse to
myself that it was to please you, but really I know it was to please
myself!”
“But why shouldn’t you please yourself and have pretty things
about you?” asked Mabin in surprise. “Is there any harm in having
nice things, if one has the money to buy them and the taste to
choose them? I suppose it helps to keep the people that make
them.”
“That is what I used to say to myself, dear,” said Mrs. Dale with a
sigh. “But now I don’t buy pretty things any more—for—for a reason.”
And again a look of deep pain swept across her face. But at Mabin’s
interested look she shook her head. “No, no,” she added, in a
frightened whisper, “I wouldn’t tell you why for all the world!”
“But you wear pretty clothes! Or is it only that you look so pretty in
them?” suggested Mabin, blushing with the fear that she was
blundering again.
Mrs. Dale shook her head smiling slightly: “I have my frocks made
to fit me, that’s all,” she said simply. “And as for these,” she touched
the flashing rings on her fingers, “I wear them because I’m obliged
to.”
Which was all sufficiently puzzling to the young girl, who, having
washed her hands, was drying them on a towel so fine that this use
seemed to her a sacrilege. She refrained from further remark,
however, upon the luxury in which she found herself installed, and as
the luncheon bell rang at that moment the two ladies went
downstairs together.
But after the beautiful appointments of her room, Mabin was struck
by the contrast afforded by the rest of the house, which was
furnished in the usual manner, with worn carpeting in the corridor
and on the stairs, and with cheap lamps on brackets and tables in
the hall and passages.
At luncheon Mrs. Dale was again in high spirits. She chattered
away brightly for the amusement of her young companion, who,
entirely unaccustomed to so much attention, was happier than she
ever remembered to have been in her life before. Mrs. Dale did not
spare the eccentricities in walk and dress of the ladies in the
neighborhood any more than they had spared hers.
“I don’t know how you can ever be dull when such funny things
come into your head!” cried simple Mabin, wiping her eyes over a
hearty fit of laughing.
Mrs. Dale grew suddenly grave again.
“Ah, nothing is amusing when one is by one’s self, or when one
has—thoughts!” she ended in a low voice, with a different word from
the one which had been in her mind. “And now let me show you my
den. No, it is not a boudoir; it is nothing but a den. Come and see.”
She opened a door which led from the dining-room at once into a
small room, even more bare, more sombre than the other. It had
evidently once served the purpose of a library or study, for there was
a heavy old bookcase in one corner and a row of empty book-
shelves in another. And there was the usual horsehair sofa.
By the one window, however, there was a low and comfortable,
though shabby wicker chair.
“I have had this other door fastened up and the cracks filled in,”
said Mrs. Dale, showing a door opposite to the one by which they
had entered. “It goes down by a flight of break-neck stairs into the
drawing-room, a loathsome dungeon into which I never penetrate.
The draught used to be strong enough to blow me away. So I
thought,” she went on with curious wistfulness, “I might just have that
done.”
Again Mabin wondered at the penitential tone; again she glanced
up. But Mrs. Dale recovered herself more quickly this time, and
putting the girl gently into the wicker chair, while she curled herself
up on the horsehair sofa, she drew Mabin out and encouraged the
girl by sympathetic questions, and by still more sympathetic listening,
to lay bare some of the recesses of her young heart.
The afternoon passed quickly; and when Mrs. Dale, springing
suddenly off the sofa after a silence, ran away into the dining-room
to ask about certain dainties which she had ordered from town for
Mabin’s benefit, but which had failed to arrive that morning, the girl
was left in a state of happy excitement, thinking what a picture the
little golden-haired creature had made as she sat curled up on the
sofa, and wondering how she could have been so ungrateful as to
imagine she could be anything but happy under the same roof with
Mrs. Dale.
Mabin looked idly out of the window, and craned her neck to see if
she could catch a glimpse of the sea. But this was the north side of
the house, and the sea was on the southwest; so she failed. But as
she looked out, she saw a fly drive slowly up the road, and was
surprised to find that the solitary occupant, an elderly lady with gray
hair, and a hard, forbidding face, stared at her fixedly through a pair
of gold eyeglasses as if she felt some personal interest in her. Mabin
felt herself blush, for she was sure she had never seen the lady
before.
Just as she drew her head in she heard the cab stop at the front
gate. Mrs. Dale’s voice, talking brightly to the parlormaid, came to
Mabin’s ears through the door, which had been left ajar. Then she
heard a knock at the front door, and the parlormaid went to answer it.
“Mabin, come here,” cried Mrs. Dale from the next room. “I want to
show you——”
The words died on her lips; and Mabin, who was in the act of
coming into the dining-room in obedience to her call, stopped short,
and, after a moment’s consideration of what she ought to do,
retreated into the smaller room and shut the door behind her.
But she had been in time to witness a strange meeting. For the
elderly lady whom she had seen in the cab had appeared at the
outer door of the dining-room as she had shown herself at the inner
one, and it was at the sight of her that Mrs. Dale had stopped short
in her speech, with a look of abhorrence and terror on her face.
The elder lady spoke at once, in a harsh, commanding voice. She
was very tall, erect, and stately, handsomely dressed in black,
altogether a commanding personality. Her voice rang through the
room, and reached Mabin’s ears, striking the girl with terror too.
“I am afraid I have taken you by surprise.”
“I suppose,” answered Mrs. Dale in a low voice, “that was what
you intended to do.”
“I am sorry to see you meet me in that spirit. I have come with
every wish for your good. I think it is not right that you should be left
here by yourself, as you hold no intercourse, of course, with the
people of the neighborhood.”
There was a pause, which Mrs. Dale would not break.
“I propose, therefore,” went on the elder lady, “to stay with you
myself, at least for a little while.”
Mrs. Dale, who had remained standing, as her visitor did also,
turned upon her quickly:
“That I will not put up with.”
“That is scarcely courteous, surely?”
“There is no question of lip-courtesy between you and me. You,
and no one else, have been the cause of all that has happened, and
I refuse, absolutely refuse, to stay under the same roof with you for a
single day.”
In the mean time poor Mabin, frightened and uncertain what to do,
had in the first place put her hands to her ears so that she might not
play the part of unwilling eavesdropper. But as the voices grew too
loud for her to avoid hearing what the ladies said, she made a frantic
rush for the door, and presented herself, breathless, blushing, in the
doorway.
“Oh, I—I can’t help hearing what you say!” cried she, glancing
from the forbidding face of the visitor to Mrs. Dale, who looked
prettier than ever in her anger.
“My dear, it doesn’t matter,” said Dorothy gently.
But the elder lady broke in:
“It does matter very much. This is not a fit house for a young girl
while you live in it.”
And turning to Mabin, she said with a sudden burst of vindictive
feeling: “Go home at once to your proper guardians. The woman you
are now with is a——”
Before she could utter the word which was ready to her lips, Mrs.
Dale interrupted her. Springing between the other two women with a
low cry, she addressed the elder lady with such a torrent of passion
that both Mabin and the visitor could only listen without an attempt to
stop her.
“You shall not say it! You shall not tell her?! You know that she was
safe with me, as if she had been in her own home. You have spoilt
her happiness with me, because you knew it made me happy. But
you shall not contaminate her with your wicked words. Go, child.”
She seized Mabin by the arm, and ran with her to the outer door of
the dining-room. “Run away. I will find you when this woman is
gone.”
And the next moment Mabin found herself in the hall, with the
dining-room door closed.
CHAPTER VI.
MR. BANKS.
There was silence in the room for a few minutes after the abrupt
dismissal of Mabin. Mrs. Dale made a perfunctory gesture of
invitation to her unwelcome visitor to be seated, and threw herself
into a hard horsehair-covered armchair by the window, which she
carefully closed.
The visitor, however, remained standing. She was evidently rather
astonished at the high-handed behavior of the culprit whom she had
come to examine, and uncertain how to deal with her. At last she
said in a very cutting tone:
“I suppose I ought not by this time to be surprised at your
behaving in an unbecoming manner to me, or to anybody. But as you
pretended to profess some penitence for your awful sin on the last
occasion of our meeting, I own I was carried away by my indignation
when I found you receiving visitors, and young girl visitors. Surely
you must recognize how improper such conduct is?”
“And which do you suppose is the more likely to do her harm? To
stay with me knowing nothing, or to hear from your lips the awful
thing you were going to tell her? Why, the poor child would never
have got over the shock!”
“It would have been less harmful to her soul than constant
communication with you, impenitent as you are!”
“You have no right to say that to me. How can you see into my
heart?”
“I judge you by your actions. I find you here, talking and laughing,
and enjoying yourself. And I hear that you have already created a
most unfavorable impression in the neighborhood by your rudeness
to people who have wished to be civil to you.”
“Was it not your own wish that I should shut myself up?”
“Yes, but in an humble, not in a defiant, manner. And then you
drive about as if nothing had happened, and excite remarks by your
appearance alone, which is not the appearance of a disconsolate
widow.”
“By whose wish was it that I bought a carriage?”
“By mine, I suppose,” replied the other frigidly, “but I meant a
brougham, so that you could go about quietly, not an open and
fashionable one, for you to show yourself off!”
“Well, I refuse to drive about in a stuffy, shut-up carriage. I am
quite ready to walk, if you wish me to put the carriage down. And I
can quite well do with less money than what you allow me. But I
maintain the right to spend my allowance, whatever it may be,
exactly as I please. Because one has committed one fault——”
“Fault!” almost shrieked the visitor. “One grave and deadly sin.”
“Because I have done wrong, great wrong,” replied Mrs. Dale. And
even to this antagonistic woman her voice shook on the words, “You
have no right to think that I am never to lead an independent life. You
have no right to the control of my actions. All that you can demand is
that I should live decently and quietly. As long as I do so I ought to
be, I will be, as free as ever.”
“But,” persisted the other, “you seem not to understand what
decency requires. In the first place it is imperatively necessary,” and
as she said this there was a look of genuine anxiety in her eyes,
“that you should hold no intercourse whatever with persons of the
opposite sex.”
Mrs. Dale said nothing to this; and the look of questioning
solicitude in the face of the other grew deeper.
“Surely,” she asked at last, “you must see this yourself?”
“That,” answered Mrs. Dale deliberately, “is also a matter which
rests entirely with me. I won’t be dictated to on that subject any more
than on any other.”
“Well, then, I warn you that I shall have to keep you in strict
surveillance, and that if I hear of your encouraging, or even
permitting, the attentions of any man, young or old, I shall feel myself
bound in honor to put him in possession of the facts of your history.”
“And if you do,” retorted Mrs. Dale, rising and speaking in a low
tone full of fire and passionate resentment, “if you interfere with me
in my quiet and harmless life by telling any person whom I choose to
call my friend the horrible thing that you hold over my head, I will
break away from you and your surveillance once and for all. I will
have the whole story published in the papers, with your share in it as
well as mine, and let the world decide which of us is the most to
blame: the young woman who has wrecked and poisoned her whole
life by one rash and wicked act, or the old one who drove her to it,
and then used it forever afterward to goad and madden her!”
She paused, and leaned against the table, white to the lips with
intense excitement, panting with her own emotion. The other lady
had grown white too, and she looked frightened as she answered:
“You are allowing your passion to carry you away again. I should
have thought you had been cured of that.” The younger lady
shuddered, but said nothing; “I was bound to put you on your guard,
that was all.”
Mrs. Dale moved restlessly. Her face was livid and moist, her
hands were shaking:
“Surely you have done that!” she said ironically. “Even the
Inquisitors of Spain used to let their victims have a little rest from the
torture sometimes; just to let the creatures get up their strength
again, to give more sport on a future occasion!”
The visitor affected to be offended by this speech, and drew
herself up in a dignified manner. But it was possible to imagine that
she felt just a little shame, or a little twinge of remorse, for her
persistent cruelty, for she went so far as to offer a cold hand to Mrs.
Dale as she prepared to go.
Mrs. Dale looked as if she would have liked to refuse the hand, but
did not dare. She touched the black glove with white, reluctant
fingers, and let it go at once.
“Good-by, Dorothy,” said the elder lady “I am sure you will believe,
when you come to yourself and think it over, that I have only your
interests at heart in the advice I have given you. No, you need not
come to the door. I shall take just one walk round to look at your
garden before I go. I have a cab waiting.”
She sailed out of the room, the jet fringes on her gown and mantle
making a noise which set Mrs. Dale’s teeth on edge.
As soon as she was alone, Dorothy threw herself face downward
on the hard sofa and burst into a passion of tears and sobs, which
rendered her deaf and blind and unconscious of everything but the
awful weight at her heart, which she must carry with her to her grave,
and of the cruelty which had revived in its first intensity the old,
weary pain.
She was mad, desperate with grief. She felt that it was more than
she could bear; that the remorse gnawing at her heart, the more
bitterly for the pleasure of the morning, had reached a point where it
became intolerable, where the strength of a woman must give way.
And then when she had crawled out of the room, with smarting
eyes and aching head, and found the way up to her own shabby,
gloomy room with staggering feet, there came to her ear from the
garden the sound of a fresh, girlish voice, uttering words which were
balm to the wounded soul.
“I don’t care,” Mabin was saying to some unseen person among
the yew trees on the lawn, “I don’t care what she’s done. She is a
sweet woman, and I love her all the more for having to be preached
to by that old cat!”
No eloquence, no smoothly rounded periods of the most brilliant
speaker in the universe could have conveyed to poor unhappy
Dorothy half the solace of those inelegant words! She began to
smile, all red-eyed as she was, and to feel that there was something
worth living for in the world after all. And when she had bathed her
face, and lain down for a little ease to her aching head, she was able
presently to look out with an impulse of pleasure at the bright green
of the lawn, where the shadows of the tall elms were growing long,
and to listen to the sound of young voices talking and laughing, and
to feel that there was something left in life after all.
The voices, as she knew, were those of Mabin and Rudolph. The
Vicar’s son had called, with a huge bunch of flowering rushes, for
Mrs. Dale, while the mysterious visitor was with her. The parlormaid,
therefore, had informed him that Mrs. Dale was engaged, but that
Miss Rose was in the garden; and he had lost no time in going in
search of the latter.
He was surprised to find her in a state of great distress, shedding
furtive tears, and trying to hide a face eloquent of grief.
“May I ask what’s the matter?” he asked, when she had begun to
talk about the flowers and the trees, in a rather broken and
unmanageable voice.
“Oh, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you!”
“Well, look here. I’ll go as far as the wall that shuts in the kitchen-
garden; that’s on the other side of the house, you know. I’ll walk very
slowly, and if I find any caterpillars on the gooseberries I’ll pick them
off. That will give you a long time. And when I come back I shall
expect you to have made up your mind whether you can tell me or
not. Only,” added he wistfully, “I do hope you will make up your mind
that you can; for I’m ‘dying of curiosity,’ as the ladies say.”
“No, they don’t say that,” said Mabin cantankerously. “Women are
much less curious than the men, really. I wouldn’t have heard what I
did for worlds if I could have helped it. And you are ‘dying’ to know
it!”
“Well, I won’t argue with you,” replied Rudolph philosophically, as
he walked slowly, according to his promise, in the direction of the
kitchen-garden.
Mabin watched him, drying her eyes, and asking herself whether
there would be any harm in confiding in him. She felt the want of
some one of whom she could take counsel in this extremely
embarrassing situation for a young girl to find herself in. If only Mrs.
Haybrow had been at hand! She was a motherly woman, whose
sympathy could be as much relied upon as her advice. Not once did
it occur to the girl to write to her step-mother, who would have
consulted Mr. Rose, with results disastrous to the reputation of poor
little Mrs. Dale. For it was not to be supposed that a father could
allow his daughter to remain in the house of a lady about whom
there was certainly more than a suspicion of irregularity of some sort.
She was pondering these things, in a helpless and bewildered
fashion, anxious to do right, and not quite certain where the right lay,
when she heard a firm step on the gravel path, and, looking round,
saw that the austere-looking lady who had descended so abruptly
upon Mrs. Dale was coming toward her.
Mabin would have liked to run away, and did indeed give one
glance and make one step, in the direction of the little path between
the yews which led round to the kitchen garden.
But the person she had to deal with was not to be put off in that
manner.
“Stop!” she cried, in such an imperious voice that Mabin obeyed at
once. “I want to speak to you.”
Mabin glanced up at the hard, cold face, and her heart rose in
rebellion at the thought that the severe expression was for poor Mrs.
Dale. She drew up her head with a flash of spirit, and waited quietly
for what the elder lady had to say.
“What is your name? And where do you live?” asked the lady.
At first, guessing that this vixenish woman wanted to communicate
with her friends about the desirability of removing her from “The
Towers,” Mabin felt inclined to refuse to answer. But a moment’s
reflection showed her that it would be easy for the lady to get the
information she wanted from the servants; so she said:
“My name is Mabin Rose, and my father is on his way to Geneva.”
“And how did he become acquainted with—” she paused, and
added in a peculiar tone, as if the name stuck in her throat—“with
Mrs. Dale?”
“They were neighbors,” answered Mabin shortly.
“You had better write to him and ask him to take you away,” said
the lady. “There are circumstances——”
But Mabin put her hands up to her ears.
“Not a word!” cried she. “I won’t hear a word. I beg your pardon for
having to be so rude, but I won’t listen to you; I won’t hear a word
against my friend.”
She was prepared in her excitement for some sort of struggle. But
the lady merely glared at her through her long-handled eye-glasses
in disgust, and with a pinched smile and a contemptuous movement
of the shoulders, walked majestically back toward the house.
The parlormaid, trying to look discreetly incurious, was standing by
the gate, to open it for the visitor to go out. But the lady paused to
enter into conversation with her; and Mabin was filled with
indignation, believing, as she did, that the stranger’s motives were
not above suspicion. And she caught the words which the maid
uttered just before the cab drove away with the stranger:
“Very well, my lady.”
And then she heard Rudolph’s voice behind her.
“Well, have you had time to make up your mind?”
She started and turned quickly. He was surprised to see that all
traces of tears had disappeared, and that her face was burning with
excitement.
“Oh, yes, yes. I must tell you now! If I didn’t, I should have to go
and confide in Mrs. Dale’s little dog!”
“Well, I promise to be quite as discreet.”
“That cab that you saw drive away had in it a woman who came
here to see Mrs. Dale, and who told me that I ought to go away and
not stay in the same house with her!”
“Well?”
“Well! Is that all you have to say? Aren’t you disgusted? You who
pretend to like and admire Mrs. Dale so much?”
“There is no pretense in it. I do like and admire her very much. But
how can you be astonished after the warnings you have had?”
Mabin looked at him with wide open eyes.
“I thought,” she said rather coldly, “that you would take her part.”
“Yes, so I will; so I do. But I don’t feel quite sure whether you ought
to.”
“And why not? Why, since I like and pity her too, shouldn’t I take
her part too?”
For a few minutes Rudolph was silent.
“You’re a girl,” said he at last.
“But that’s no reason why I should act meanly!”
“Ah, well, if it’s not a reason, it’s an excuse.”
“I don’t think so. I like to stand by my friends. I haven’t many; I
haven’t any I like better than Mrs. Dale. So, whatever it is that she
has done, I shall stay with her as long as she wants me, and do all I
can to prevent these stories getting to papa’s and mamma’s ears.”
Rudolph looked at her fair face, which was aglow with generous
enthusiasm, and smiled in hearty approval.
“That’s right,” said he warmly. “And if people are too much
shocked by your daring, why you can marry me, you know, and
when once you’re married you can snap your fingers at them all.”
But at this suggestion Mabin had suddenly turned pale. In truth
she liked Rudolph well enough not to be able to bear a jest on the
idea of marriage with him. Naturally he was surprised and even a
little hurt by the abrupt change in her sensitive face.
“Oh, you need not look so frightened,” said he, laughing. “I only
suggested it as a last resource in case of extremity.”
“Oh, I know. But—what extremity?”
“If people think the worse of you for standing by your friend.”
Mabin drew her tall, slim figure to its fullest height.
“I shouldn’t care,” said she. “I should snap my fingers at them in
any case.”
Rudolph considered her for a few silent minutes. It was then that
she uttered the words which reached Mrs. Dale’s ears, and startled
while they comforted the unhappy woman:
“I don’t care—I don’t care what she’s done. She is a sweet
woman, and I love her all the more for having to be preached to by
that old cat.”
And then she noticed that she and her companion were standing
rather near an open window, and she walked quickly back to the
lawn and the elm trees.
“What old cat?”
“Didn’t you see her? A tall woman with a face carved in marble.
She was driving away as you came back.”
“I didn’t see much of her. Do you know who she is?”
“No. She’s a ‘ladyship,’ from what the maid said. And she looks
like one, which ladyships hardly ever do. That’s all I know.”
“A relation of Mrs. Dale’s, I suppose?”
“Ye-e-s, I suppose so, from the things she said. But oh! Mrs. Dale
has never done anything to deserve such a relation as that!”
“Poor thing! No. But one can’t help feeling curious.”
“I can help it,” cried Mabin stoutly. “I know how these spiteful old
women make mountains out of molehills, and I will never believe that
it isn’t a molehill in this case after all.”
Rudolph looked at her curiously.
“Do you know who it is that has taken your father’s house?” he
asked in a dry tone.
“Yes, a Mr. Banks. He came this morning, as soon as papa and
mamma were out of the house.”
“And do you know anything about him? Is he a friend of your
father’s?”
“No. He was looking for a furnished house down here, and heard
that we wanted to let ours. It was all arranged through his solicitor
and papa’s. He is an invalid, I believe, come here for change of air.
Why do you ask?”
“Because I was in the lane between your garden and this just
before I came here, and I saw a man walking along the grass path,
and recognized him as the man I found watching Mrs. Dale a
fortnight ago. There’s a secret for you, in return for yours.”
Mabin looked frightened. She remembered her own suspicions
that the man who had presented himself as Mr. Banks was an
impostor.
“What was he like?” she asked.
“He was very thin and pale, and he looked like a gentleman. I
could hardly tell whether he was old or young.”
“Perhaps,” she faltered, “he isn’t Mr. Banks at all!”
Rudolph did not answer immediately. Then he said slowly:
“I wonder what he has come for?”
Mabin stared at him stupidly. As they stood silent in the quiet
garden, they both heard a slight rustling of the leaves, a cracking of
the branches, near the wall which divided the garden from the lane.

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A central topic in the philosophy of mind is the category of so-called intentional

These are terms whose extensions purport to correspond to fundamental dis-

¹³ This is not Burge’s example, but it ﬁts our exposition better.

speakers. In §1.5.4 we will ask whether the notion of meaning, construed as

²¹ Quoted in Fllesdal (forthcoming).

nevertheless another kind of content that is internally determined. According to

²⁶ Lewis (1979: 526). ²⁷ See e.g., Chalmers (2003, 2006a).

1.1. The bearers of content

is true, where ‘V’ is a psychological verb, such as ‘believe’ or ‘desire’. We assume

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

ð2Þ ∃eðAGENTðe; xÞ∧CONTENTðe; that pÞ∧VðeÞÞ4

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

characterizing ur-content as the function denoted by ‘CONTENT’ in (2). It is

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

¹⁰ Our paradigms are Kaplan (1977) and Lewis (1980).

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

h8α 8β WðαÞ ¼ WðβÞ

∃w ∃α hðα occurs ! w ¼ WðαÞÞ

¹⁵ See Yli-Vakkuri (MS).

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

Now suppose that I ¼ W. Then it is straightforward to talk about ‘the truth

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

can be more tolerant of intrinsic non-qualitative properties, since Juhani’s being

of one, or standing in certain mass-congruence and mass-between relations to

h8α8Q8CððQAPðαÞ ¼ Q ∧ ⟦α⟧ ¼ CÞ ! h8βðQAPðβÞ ¼ Q ! ⟦β⟧ ¼ CÞÞ,

i.e., necessarily, if a thought with a certain QAP, Q, has a certain ⟦.⟧-content, C,

WHAT IS NARROW CONTENT ? 

Narrowness, as just deﬁned, is a species of strong local supervenience. Accord-

supervenes on QAPs. That is to say, a property P is narrow iff P satisﬁes the

h8α8QððQAPðαÞ ¼ Q ∧ PðαÞÞ ! h8βðQAPðβÞ ¼ Q ! PðβÞÞÞ

i.e., necessarily, if a thought with a certain QAP, Q, has property P, then,

h8α1 . . .8αn 8Q1 . . .8Qn ððQAPðα1 Þ ¼ QAPðβ1 Þ∧. . .∧QAPðαn Þ ¼ QAPðβn ÞÞ

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²¹ Quoted in Fllesdal (forthcoming).