Abstract

This paper is an examination of Jerry Fodor's internalist position in his controversy with externalists. His internalism is not to be taken as the contention that the whole of mental content is independent of the surrounding world. Rather his point is that the scientific explanation of behavior requires that the relevant mental content should be causally efficacious and therefore supervene on brain states. If we have to give the content of a propositional attitude a semantic value, we can interpret "narrow contents" as functions from both their contexts and mental states to "wide contents".