Wide content

Definition and Historical Background

Wide content is a central notion in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. It refers to the representational content of a mental state (such as a belief, desire, or perception) that is individuated partly by factors external to the subject, such as the physical environment or social-linguistic practices. This stands in contrast to narrow content, which is defined solely in terms of what is “in the head” (for example, the subject’s internal physical or functional state).

The term arose in late 20th-century debates about content externalism, especially following the work of Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. These philosophers challenged traditional internalist intuitions that what a mental state is about, or what it means, is determined entirely by an individual’s internal configuration.

Wide content is thus a label for a family of externalist views that claim mental content is at least partly constituted by the subject’s relations to the world—to objects, natural kinds, social institutions, and linguistic communities.

Putnam, Burge, and Classic Arguments

Putnam’s Twin Earth

Hilary Putnam’s famous Twin Earth thought experiment is a standard entry point for understanding wide content. Putnam imagines a planet, Twin Earth, that is physically identical to Earth in almost all respects, except that the liquid that fills the lakes and rivers and that Twin Earthlings call “water” has a different chemical composition (XYZ instead of H₂O). A person on Earth and their physically identical counterpart on Twin Earth are molecule-for-molecule duplicates, share the same internal states, and use the same word “water” in the same way within their respective communities.

Putnam argues that despite being internally identical, when the Earthling thinks “water is wet,” their thought is about H₂O, whereas the Twin Earthling’s thought is about XYZ. Thus, the content of their thoughts differs because what they are related to in their respective environments differs. This suggests that meanings and mental contents are not determined solely by internal states—they are wide.

Burge and Social Externalism

Tyler Burge extends the externalist insight into the social domain. In his well-known arthritis case, a patient falsely believes he has “arthritis” in his thigh. According to Burge, the content of this belief depends on how the term arthritis is used and understood in the medical and linguistic community. Because in actual medical usage “arthritis” refers to a specific kind of joint inflammation, the patient’s belief content is partly governed by those social and linguistic norms, even if he himself misunderstands the term.

This yields social externalism: at least some mental contents are wide because they depend on communal practices, not just on the individual’s subjective or internal states.

Together, Putnam and Burge provide landmark arguments that mental content is wide: it depends on environment and community, not only on the subject’s brain or cognitive architecture.

Narrow vs. Wide Content

The narrow–wide distinction plays a structural role in debates about representation.

• Narrow content:

  • Supervenes on the subject’s intrinsic properties, usually understood as physical or functional properties of the brain or cognitive system.
  • Two internally identical individuals must have the same narrow contents, regardless of differences in their external environments.
  • Often invoked to explain behavior and cognition in a way that is supposed to be neutral with respect to particular environments.

• Wide content:

  • Supervenes partly on relational properties—the subject’s environment, causal history, and social-linguistic context.
  • Two internally identical individuals may differ in wide content if their external circumstances differ (as on Earth and Twin Earth).
  • Emphasizes the aboutness or intentionality of thought in relation to actual objects, kinds, and social norms.

Some philosophers propose that there are two levels of content:

• A narrow content suitable for capturing what is shared across different environments and for use in scientific explanation of cognitive processing.
• A wide content that captures how thoughts are anchored to the world and that underwrites reference, communication, and rational assessment.

Others argue that only wide content is philosophically respectable, or conversely that wide content is dispensable for the causal explanation of behavior. The distinction therefore becomes a focal point in arguments about how to reconcile naturalistic psychology with intuitive notions of meaning and reference.

Contemporary Debates and Applications

Externalism vs. Internalism

Wide content is at the heart of the debate between externalism and internalism about mental content.

• Externalists maintain that wide content correctly captures how thoughts are world-involving, and they appeal to it to explain successful reference, learning, and the normativity of belief and assertion.
• Internalists often object that wide content cannot figure straightforwardly in causal-explanatory accounts of behavior, because such explanations should depend only on what is inside the agent. They may therefore favor narrow content for scientific psychology, relegating wide content to a more descriptive or semantic role.

Self-Knowledge and First-Person Authority

A major line of criticism targets the compatibility of wide content with privileged self-knowledge. If what one thinks depends on subtle environmental or social factors, some argue it may become harder to see how one can have immediate, authoritative knowledge of one’s own thoughts. Defenders of wide content respond by developing accounts of first-person authority that allow externalism about content without undermining self-knowledge.

Mental Causation and Cognitive Science

In philosophy of cognitive science, a recurring question is whether wide content can figure in the kinds of explanations offered by computational or neuroscientific theories of mind. Some theorists claim that cognitive science should traffic only in representations individuated by narrow content, since these are more appropriate to algorithmic-level explanation. Others contend that many psychological and neuroscientific models already presuppose wide content (for example, in perception of specific environmental properties).

Extended and Embodied Mind

Wide content is also related to, though distinct from, debates about the extended mind and embodied cognition. While wide content focuses on the individuation of representational content, extended-mind theorists argue that the realization of cognitive processes sometimes extends beyond the brain into tools, artifacts, and environments. Nonetheless, both discussions share the basic intuition that understanding the mind requires looking beyond the individual’s head and into their situated relations with the world.

In contemporary usage, wide content remains a standard term for content that is environment- or community-dependent, central to assessing the viability of externalism, the nature of mental representation, and the interface between everyday psychological explanation and scientific theories of cognition.