2.1 Linguistic Content

Next, let's consider a broad question: What is language for? Most obviously, language allows us to communicate, ask and answer questions, express disagreement and agreement, and coordinate our actions. Supporting these interpersonal phenomena is plausibly a central role that language plays. Of course, we can use language other ways (telling jokes, stories, etc.) but it will be enough for present purposes to attend to the more familiar interpersonal uses of language. This picture of language, as primarily a conventional tool for interpersonal coordination, lines up with Lewis's view from his early book Convention (Reference Lewis1969) and several later papers (Lewis Reference Lewis and Gunderson1975, Reference Lewis1979, Reference Lewis1992, Reference Lewis1997).

What does linguistic content have to be like if language is going to support these coordinative phenomena? For one thing it must be robust in the face of deviant uses of expressions. A case adapted from Burge (Reference Burge1979) will serve as an illustration. Suppose Freda is suffering an intermittent pain in her thigh and visits her GP for medical advice. She is a basketball player and has heard that basketball players are susceptible to a condition called ‘arthritis’ in their limbs. She says to her doctor ‘I think I have arthritis in my thigh’. Freda is confused about arthritis and how ‘arthritis’ is used. She is, in a sense, using the term in a deviant way. But crucially Freda's deviant use does not mean that the doctor cannot understand or get information from her utterance. Freda can use the term ‘arthritis’ successfully (such that it means what it means in the wider community) while being confused about how it is used.

Or consider an example borrowed from Bolinger (Reference Bolinger2020: 12).

Let's also suppose that she does not intend to derogate. When the neighbor uses those slurs, they have a derogatory meaning despite her sincerity, lack of the intention to derogate, and lack of contempt for the people of Asian descent. The meaning of the slur is insensitive to the intentions and beliefs of some individual users. This is what Bolinger calls ‘Derogatory Autonomy’ according to which ‘[w]hether a term is derogatory is largely independent of speaker intent. Sincerely not intending to derogate does not block the intimation of contempt, etc., involved in using a slur’ (Reference Bolinger2020: 13). The impact of those terms is derogatory partly because of how the term is used in the wider linguistic community and its being derogatory is, as we have seen, insensitive to certain individual attitudes and intentions.

These examples bring out that linguistic content is insensitive to at least some idiosyncrasies of individual users. What an agent says when they make an utterance can come apart from what they take themselves to be saying or intend to say. This kind of robustness is plausibly part of why language can facilitate communication, disagreement, etc. Freda's mistaken beliefs about arthritis and the term ‘arthritis’ do not threaten the claim that ‘arthritis’ means an inflammation of the joints even when Freda uses the term. If we deny this kind of insensitivity, isolated deviant use of an expression would threaten to unduly undermine or change the meaning of a term in a public language, making public meaning too unstable to play its role in facilitating interpersonal communication and coordination. The requirement that linguistic content be robust in this way might be characterized as part of what is required for linguistic content to be ‘public’. It is required for us to be public speakers when we use language.

2.2 Belief Content

Next up, beliefs. What are beliefs for? One important thing beliefs do is guide and explain reasoning and actions. When thinking and doing things in the world, we are often guided by how we take the world to be. If I believe that the faculty meeting is in seminar room A (and I want to attend the meeting), I will walk to seminar room A when the time comes. In a slogan borrowed from Ramsey (Reference Ramsey and Braithwaite1929: 238), ‘a belief is a map of neighbouring space by which we steer’. This ‘space’ is generally understood as a vast multidimensional space with properties as locations so that our ‘maps’ may guide not merely motion but cognition and behavior more broadly. This idea has been largely taken up in the literature, though it is controversial how central this role for beliefs is. Certainly Stalnaker (Reference Stalnaker1984), Lewis (Reference Lewis1986: 34–40), and the many who follow them have emphasized this role as one of the most important of belief's roles.

If beliefs are to play this role, our characterisation of belief content should reflect this role. In particular, it should be sensitive to some of the believer's errors, ignorance, and idiosyncrasies.

Lois is looking for Superman when she walks past Clark's desk. What explains why she walks past Clark's desk? Part of the explanation seems to be that she does not believe that Clark is Superman. This seems part of the correct explanation of her behavior even if it is widely known in her community that Clark is Superman. When it comes to explaining behavior and the role that Lois's beliefs play in guiding her behavior, the fact that she is ignorant of some fact should be reflected in our characterization of the content of her beliefs about Clark.

Or consider again the case of Freda. Unless she is corrected, she will think, talk, and behave in accordance with her mistaken conception of arthritis. How her beliefs guide and explain her behavior and reasoning will often be sensitive to her mistaken beliefs about arthritis and how the term ‘arthritis’ is used. How she should behave and reason (given the way the term is used in her community) is one thing; how she does act and reason given her mistaken beliefs is another, and if we are interested in explaining how she acts and reasons, it is the latter that should concern us.

How a given belief guides an agent's action is also sensitive to her other beliefs. How my belief that Bronwyn is in her office will guide my actions will be sensitive to my other beliefs. Suppose I am a detective trying to hunt down a masked vigilante, ‘the Kookaburra Queen’, and I believe that Bronwyn is the Kookaburra Queen; the belief that Bronwyn is in her office will guide me in a very decisive way! I will rush to her office to arrest her! But that belief will not guide my action in that way if I do not believe that she is the Kookabura Queen; it may not affect my behavior in any significant way. So how a belief guides action depends on how it is integrated into a broader system of belief. So since ex hypothesi belief content is sensitive to how a given belief guides behavior, we have reason to think that belief content is more holistic; the content of a given belief is partially determined by its relation to other beliefs. Indeed, prominent defenders of the conception of belief content discussed here insist on this kind of holism (Lewis Reference Lewis1986: 32; Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson Reference Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson2007; Ramsey Reference Ramsey and Braithwaite1929). Though we don't express all our beliefs when we make an utterance, the content of the belief we express is plausibly sensitive to many of our other beliefs.

The content of beliefs, qua maps by which believers steer, seems to be sensitive to individual errors and ignorance. So belief content should be understood as being sensitive to the believer's individual psychological state, narrowly construed (Lewis Reference Lewis1986: 27–40; 1981). When drawing up, correcting, and being guided by our maps of the world, we are on our own. Facts about how others think and talk are only of use to us when they are reflected in our narrowly construed psychology. We are private investigators, though of course we can (and often do) gather information by interrogating witnesses.

From the discussion so far, we can already see that there is a kind of mismatch between constraints on the contents of beliefs and the constraints on the content of linguistic expressions; the facts to which linguistic content should be insensitive seem to be precisely the facts to which belief content should be sensitive. Here I echo some of the remarks from Lewis (Reference Lewis1986: 27–31), Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson (Reference Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson2007), Crimmins (Reference Crimmins1992), Heck (Reference Heck2002), Loar (Reference Loar1998), and others.

8.1 The Debt

So there are a number of models of communication, assertion, disagreement, and agreement that are unavailable to the autonomist. Does this mean that we should reject autonomism? I don't think so, at least not immediately.

The fact that autonomism is incompatible with elegant models of these phenomena means that autonomists incur a kind of explanatory debt. They must develop alternative autonomist-friendly models with comparable predictions and power. Autonomists should take this debt seriously and avoid defaulting if they can. That being said, the independent motivations for autonomism mean that it is worth exploring whether and how this debt might be paid.

8.2 Payment Plans

There are a number of promising payment plans open to the autonomist. Attitudes have many features that do not supervene on their content and stand in relations to the world and each other aside from the ‘has the same content as’ relation. Perhaps one of these relations might serve as a basis for alternative accounts of communication, disagreement, and the rest. I cannot hope to develop fully an autonomist-friendly account of these phenomena here, though I will attempt to give an outline of some promising options.

What other relations could do the job of underpinning phenomena at the interface? One natural idea is that the ‘about the same thing’ relation might do the job. For example, maybe my belief that Bronwyn is in her office and Peter's belief that she is not conflict partly because both are about Bronwyn.

Does this mean understanding the content of the belief as being at least partly referential? Not necessarily. Some prominent defenders of fine-grained belief content and those who follow them (Chalmers Reference Chalmers and Chalmers2002: 631n29; 2011: 602, 620–21; Kipper Reference Kipper2018) argue that there is also a referential element to mental content that supports disagreement and communication. According to these proposals, there is a coarse-grained referential element to attitude content, the identity of that supports phenomena at the interface. But autonomists need not think that what an attitude is about is reflected in its content. The autonomist can plausibly deny that the aboutness of a representation is a kind of content (or determines a kind of content); see below. I have also argued elsewhere that, in any case, referential dimensions of content do not explain disagreement and communication (Sandgren Reference Sandgren2018).

To see how an aboutness-based conception of disagreement might work, let's start with Lewis's (Reference Lewis1981) autonomist-friendly conception of attitude content from ‘What puzzling Pierre does not believe’. Suppose Pierre has the belief he would express by saying ‘London is not pretty’ and the belief that he would express by saying that ‘Londres is pretty’. I have simplified the case from Kripke's (Reference Kripke and Margalit1979) original, abstracting away from issues about translation. According to Lewis, the contents of Pierre's beliefs are that there is something that plays the London role that is not pretty and something that plays the Londres role that is pretty. These ‘roles’ are sensitive to his ignorance and error, and therefore end up being extremely fine grained.Footnote ¹ These contents are compatible, there is a possible situation in which they are both true (e.g., a world in which one pretty thing plays the Londres role and a different nonpretty thing plays the London role).

But there is a sense in which these beliefs conflict. If these were beliefs of two different agents, we would naturally say that they disagree about London. Here I echo some remarks from my ‘Puzzling Pierre and Intentional Identity’ (Sandgren Reference Sandgren2019b: sec. 3). How can we account for this conflict without coarse-graining belief content? Lewis's discussion of Kripke's puzzle about belief in ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ (Reference Lewis1986: 33) suggests a way. Even if the content of Pierre's belief does not include London, his belief is about London. One way to explain this aboutness is in terms of his being connected to London via two causal chains of acquaintance. These causal chains can be more or less long and the corresponding acquaintance may be more or less direct (33). For instance one might have seen London for oneself or one might have only read about it in a book. Perhaps the beliefs are plausibly about the same thing since the two causal-acquaintance relations lead to the same city. For the purposes of outlining autonomist-friendly accounts of phenomena at the interface, we can work with this kind of simple causal account, though I should emphasize that there are other ways of understanding aboutness and subject matter in general that are not purely causal; more on this below.

The autonomist can then contend that the content of a belief is one thing and its subject matter (what it is about) is another and that belief content is fine grained and seldom shared while subject matter is coarse grained and often shared. For a discussion of this distinction see Lewis (Reference Lewis1986: 33) and more recent work by Jackson (Reference Jackson, Johnson and Smith2015), Sandgren (2019), and Pepp (Reference Pepp, Raleigh and Knowles2019).Footnote ² It is then open to the autonomist to claim that it is shared subject matter that is the arbiter of genuine disagreement; the relation of being about the same thing could then plausibly explain (or help to explain) the conflict between Pierre's beliefs. They conflict because they are about the same thing and they ascribe conflicting properties.

On this account, Peter disagrees with me in the case described above because we are both thinking and talking about Bronwyn and we ascribe incompatible properties to her. This conception of disagreement is compatible with the claim that there is no element of content corresponding to Bronwyn that forms part of the content of our respective beliefs.

There are also parallel possibilities for aboutness-based accounts of agreement, communication, and assertion. To start with, communication. Suppose the content of the belief expressed by the speaker and the belief formed by the audience have different contents (and that there is no discrete element of content in common across those beliefs). They may yet be communicating if the beliefs are about the same things. When I say ‘Bronwyn is in her office’ and you form a belief on the basis of what I said, we could say that the communicative interaction is successful only when the belief expressed and the belief formed are about the same things. Properties are often part of a belief's subject matter (in this case ‘being in her office’) and for communication to be successful in this case this property must be one of the things the two beliefs are about. If you end up with a belief about a totally different property and ascribe it to Bronwyn, then communication may have failed for that reason.

Next, agreement. Suppose you and I believe that Dobbin is a horse. There is a sense in which our beliefs stand and fall together. But if the autonomist is right, this will not be because they have the same content. Instead we can say that because they are about the same thing and property, they will stand and fall together in the sense that one cannot be true while the other is false without changing what they are about. If this is right, to think ‘the same thing’ is not to have beliefs with the same truth conditions, rather it is, at least in part, a matter of beliefs having the same subject matter (objects and properties).

Finally, let's turn to assertion. Linguistic items also have subject matter. The sentence ‘Jill is ill’ is about Jill (and being ill). This observation suggests a natural account of the relationship between assertions and the beliefs they express. When I say ‘Jill is ill’, the belief I am expressing will not have the same content as the assertion itself, according to the autonomist. But the autonomist can say that part of what makes for successful assertion (and plays many of the explanatory roles content identity is typically taken to play) is that the belief expressed and the sentence uttered have the same subject matter, namely Jill and being ill.

Of course this is only a brief sketch of autonomist-friendly accounts of these phenomena at the interface. A number of the crucial notions involved will need to be unpacked and their details spelled out. Most importantly, aboutness (and sameness of aboutness) has been largely treated as a black box here. I briefly sketched one way of understanding subject matter—as being determined by relations of causal acquaintance with objects in the world. But purely causal ways of making sense of subject matter and sameness of subject matter are crucially limited (Sandgren Reference Sandgren2019a, Reference Sandgren2019b, Reference Sandgren2021). To begin with, purely causal accounts of aboutness cannot handle representations of abstracta (e.g., numbers) and intentional targets that appear not to exist (e.g., witches) since, in both cases, the respective subject matters do not seem to stand in the right sort of causal relations of acquaintance with believers. It is, however, extremely plausible that we can make assertions, communicate, agree, and disagree about abstracta and intentional targets that, in some sense, turn out not to exist. So, at best, causal relations of acquaintance are only part of the story about aboutness. These considerations put some constraints on the theory of aboutness that autonomists ought to plug into the proposed autonomist-friendly accounts of phenomena at the interface. Of course, there are many important questions about the nature of this kind of aboutness that must be left open here.

However, there is one feature of aboutness, as I am conceiving it, that bears emphasis at this point. The aboutness of a belief should be distinguished from what we might call the ‘reference’ of a representation. A belief about Stockholm might refer to an object in a way that a belief about the fountain of youth does not (since there is no fountain of youth). Yet apparently both beliefs can have aboutness; it seems as if we can think about Stockholm and we can think about the fountain of youth. Of course there are those who argue that reference and aboutness correspond in these cases either because we cannot really think about the fountain of youth or because there really is, in some sense, a fountain of youth that the relevant beliefs refer to. But, as I conceive of them, reference and aboutness are distinct features of representations.

For aboutness-based accounts of phenomena at the interface to work, we will need to plug in an adequate account of aboutness. It is beyond the scope of this paper to compare accounts of aboutness or develop a full picture of aboutness, qua element of the autonomist explanations of assertion, communication, agreement, and disagreement I sketched above. Nonetheless, the above observations about cases that are trouble for simply causal views suggest that whichever account we plug in, it had better be generalizable to these cases. There are a number of available accounts of aboutness and co-aboutness that fulfill this criterion. For instance, there is the concept-based approach of Sainsbury (Reference Sainsbury and Jeshion2010), the phenomenological approaches defended by Farkas (Reference Farkas2008), Kriegel (Reference Kriegel2008), and Mendelovici (Reference Mendelovici2018), the aspect-based account due to Geach (Reference Geach1976), the co-aboutness first approach due to Sandgren (Reference Sandgren2021), and the cognitive role-based accounts due to Jeshion (Reference Jeshion, Campbell, O.’Rourke and Shier2002: 67), Azzouni (Reference Azzouni2015), and Crane (Reference Crane2015), to mention a few.

There is also an open question about how properties form part of the subject matter of representations that I haven't answered here. But I hope that I have done enough to suggest one promising way the autonomist could attempt to pay off their explanatory debt; aboutness (and relations of being about the same thing) may be able to play many of the roles traditionally earmarked for content and identity (or similarity) of content across representations.

Another promising option that I should mention is based on Weber's ‘Recentering Model of Communication’ (2012: 210–13). The idea is, roughly, that when we hear and understand utterances we extract information from the utterance in accordance with our beliefs about how the speaker is related to ourselves. This means that even if the contents of the belief expressed and the belief formed are different (and have no element of content in common) we can still properly extract information from utterances in a way that constitutes successful communication. Weber (216–18) argues that disagreement and agreement might be captured with a parallel ‘Recentering’ model of disagreement and agreement that does not require belief contents to be shared across the relevant believers. Weber also contends that the model can be extended in a natural way to account for the content of assertion, at least in simple cases (281–82). Jackson (Reference Jackson2010: sec. 7) presents a similar account of communication and assertion based on centered worlds. Of course, more work is required to explore whether models of this kind capture the features of communication, disagreement, etc. that they are supposed to capture. It is also unclear whether the recentering models should be understood as rivals to or supplementary to the aboutness-based models described above. I am inclined to think of the proposals as supplementing each other, but more work is needed to understand if and how they fit together.

The last move I want to discuss involves a kind of Davidsonian (Reference Davidson1973, Reference Davidson1974, Reference Davidson1985) appeal to charity. The autonomist could argue that messy beliefs and systems of beliefs don't interface with language directly. Instead, tidied up proxies for beliefs, the result of applying certain principles of charity to the beliefs and their contents, do. When beliefs interface with language, we could apply principles of charity to the relevant beliefs and their contents thereby producing more coherent, reasonable, sensitive to the evidence, etc., rational reconstructions, or ‘proxies’ for the beliefs and their contents that fit more easily with public language. The hope would be that this proxy would be more in line with the determinants of the content of a public language and would, therefore, help bridge the gap between mental and linguistic content. In turn, the autonomist could claim that the relations between beliefs that support communication, assertion, and the rest are tied to how the charitably reconstructed analogs of beliefs are related. For example, two such proxies for distinct beliefs (with distinct contents) might have the same or similar content. Again, many details of this move would have to be filled in here, and many crucial questions answered (What does this charity amount to? Can these tidied up proxy contents really interface cleanly with language? etc.). However, it is an interesting option worthy of exploration.

There are a number of promising possibilities for paying the debt without compromising autonomism or the motivations for autonomism (I have only been able to briefly outline a handful), so I don't think the autonomist should resign themselves to defaulting just yet.

8.3 Belief Reports

Autonomism also requires a complicated account of the relationship between the content of attitudes and attitude reports. Again, this is not surprising. Attitude reports are linguistic entities and their subject matter is, at least partly, the content of belief. Like assertion and the rest, attitude reports involve the interface between mental content and linguistic content.

There is a conception of the relationship between belief content and belief reports according to which:

On this kind of story, ‘believes that . . .’ constructions have the role of expressing the proposition that is the content of the ascribed belief; we can read off the content of beliefs from the content of belief reports in a straightforward way. Let's call this the ‘carbon copy’ (CC) theory of attitude reports. The CC theory also supports a simple disquotation principle along the following lines:

The CC theory is a simple and plausible view.

The autonomist must resist the CC theory. Is this a heavy cost? I don't think so. Firstly, one might be driven to reject the CC theory anyway. For instance, Lewis (Reference Lewis1981: 283–85) convincingly argues that Kripke's (Reference Kripke and Margalit1979) puzzle about belief provides grounds for a refutation of the CC theory. Roughly, Lewis contends that Kripke's puzzling case is one in which we can arrive at a false view about an agent's beliefs (that they believe an obvious contradiction) if we accept the CC theory of belief reports, and it is the CC theory that should be jettisoned. I take arguments like these to weigh heavily against the CC theory. Lewis (Reference Lewis1981: 285–87) and Jackson (Reference Jackson, Johnson and Smith2015) also give more general epistemic objections to the CC theory according to which the CC theory implies that believers have significant knowledge about the essences of the object their beliefs are about when they do not. I also find these arguments convincing and if we have independent reason to reject the CC theory, it is no cost that there is a tension between autonomism and the CC theory.

Secondly, the autonomist has tools ready to hand to build an alternative approach to belief reports (Lewis Reference Lewis1986: 32–33). Suppose Ralph is watching a spy at work in the shadows but does not recognize that the spy is Bernard. ‘Ralph believes that Bernard is a spy’ can be true in this case even if Ralph does not realize, believe, or know that the spy is Bernard. The autonomist can say that ‘Ralph believes that Bernard is a spy’ has a mixed subject matter in that it is not only about the content of his beliefs (that we could take as being as the autonomist says they are), but also about which objects what his beliefs are really about. As Lewis (Reference Lewis1986: 33) suggests, ‘Bernard gets into the act . . . because he is the one Ralph is actually watching.’ The fact that belief reports concern these facts about what the belief is about that might not be reflected in the believer's narrowly construed psychological state does not imply that those same facts make a difference to the content of the relevant beliefs. The report says that he has a belief that there is a spy at work in the shadows, and that that belief really is about Bernard.

I can then say that

In this case, the latter part of the right-hand side of the biconditional is not reflected in Ralph's narrowly construed psychology (he does not recognize Bernard). This ‘mixed subject matter’ model is natural, attractive, and consistent with autonomism. Like some of the other accounts of phenomena at the interface sketched above, this model requires a nontrivial distinction between a belief's content and what it is about along the lines of that discussed in the previous section.

Does giving up on the CC model mean giving up on a systematic program for compositional semantics? It is clear that we will have to give up on the kind of compositionality supported by the CC theory and simple disquotation principles. As one would expect, many forms of compositionality will be more difficult to ensure given autonomism. Autonomism implies a mess at the interface and attitude reports are at the interface. But there is reason to believe that we could build a compositional semantics for belief reports in line with the mixed subject matter model. Also, if we go with the aboutness-based proposal, whether we can establish a compositional semantics will depend on whether aboutness is amenable to a compositional treatment. Again, I cannot fully spell out this or any other promising autonomist-friendly model of belief reports here, but I hope I have shown that there are promising and exploration-worthy options available for making sense of belief reports in an autonomist-friendly way.

But even if autonomism does imply that our account of belief reports will need to be messier than we might have liked, that is no reason to reject autonomism immediately. The study of attitudes and their contents is one thing, a study of attitude reports is another. Why should the elegance of a theory of attitude reports dictate our theory of attitude content? Why not reason the other way around? If the autonomist treatment of mental content is independently motivated, as I have argued it is, then there is some pressure to accept the consequences thereof. It is not obviously the right choice to make our conception of mental content unfit for purpose to make it suit a given theory of attitude reports. I am aware that this point is quite controversial; there are those who think that belief reports and their structure are one of our best guides to studying belief content, but those who are tempted by autonomism need not sign on to this kind of reports-first approach.