Functionalism and Broad Content

Abstract

The contents of certain intentional states are broad or context-bound. The contents of some beliefs (and desires and hopes. . .) depend on how things are outside the subject in addition to depending on how things are inside the subject.1 What implications does this have for the functionalist theory of mind? In this paper we defend the simplest reply to this question. Functionalism is the doctrine that, for very many kinds of psychological states, to be in a psychological state of that kind is to have in one a state playing a certain role between inputs, outputs, and other internal states. It is the nature of the role, not the nature of the occupant of the role, which matters. The simplest functionalist response to states with broad contents is to analyse them in terms of broad roles, that is in terms of roles which are specified as having some inputs or outputs that are happenings outside the skin. When functionalists give an account of a belief with broad content, this response requires them to include outside happenings in their specification of the functional role definitive of having a belief with that content. The response, therefore, ensures that having a belief with that content involves how things are outside the subject as well as how they are inside.2 It has seemed to many that this simple, minimally disruptive response on behalf of functionalism to the fact of broad content cannot be right. Sometimes the argument turns on the claim that because an intentional state's content is an essential property of it, states with broad content are essentially broad, and essential broadness is alleged to be incompatible with functionalism, or at least incompatible with the functionalism just sketched. The idea is that broad content presents a much more radical challenge to