GESTIÓN DE COLABORADORES OPERATIVOS – MANO DE

The foregoing considerations emphasise the point that scientific psychology, given its explanatory ambitions and theoretical com m itm ents, m ust attribute intentional contents to our representational states. But it is consistent with this point that such content is narrow; that scientific psychology attributes locally supervenient contents to our states. In this section I will attempt to outline some serious practical obstacles that face any scientific psychologist who attempts to engage in narrow psychology. The moral I will attempt to draw is that these obstacles are such that the scientific psychologist would be well advised to refrain from going narrow if at all possible. I will also suggest that it is indeed possible to avoid going narrow; that the circumstances in which we find ourselves are such that the advantages of a narrow psychology over a broad one are not so significant as to justify all the additional bother that would be entailed in going narrow.

The first practical problem has to do with the need to construct an adequate notion of narrow content. What exactly is narrow content? W hat has to be the case for two thought tokens to have the same narrow content? To say that narrow content is locally supervenient and leave it at that is hardly to answer these questions in an illuminating way. A narrow scientific psychology would have to answer such questions and do so by way of the provision of an adequate explication or elucidation of the concept of narrow content that it employed. A failure to do this would have the result that it would be unclear (both to practitioners of scientific psychology and to on-looking outsiders alike) what the aim of scientific psychology was and w hat claims were being made by a scientific psychologist whenever she presented a narrow explanation or attributed a narrow state to a subject. All this could result in unhealthy confusion w ithin the discipline as psychologists fail to understand the

pronouncements of their fellows and systematically talk at cross purposes. However, developing and explicating a suitable notion of narrow content in such a way as to find favour across the discipline is hardly going to be an easy task. Such a burden would be avoided if scientific psychology were not to deviate from folk psychology in terms of the kinds of intentional properties that it attributed to our psychological states or the concept of content that it employed. G rasping the m eaning of the pronouncem ents of scientific psychologists would be no more problematic a business (both for the practitioners of that discipline and for outside onlookers) than that of understanding everyday folk psychological descriptions and explanations; we could rely quite successfully on our mastery of folk psychological concepts and our facility as folk psychologists. The task of elucidating or explicating the concept of content employed by scientific psychologists would thus become a philosophical one (just as is that of elucidating and explicating the concept of causation). As a general rule, technical concepts that don't have a life and a track record outside of the particular scientific discipline that is their home need to be explicated or elucidated by and for the practitioners of that discipline. The concept of narrow content is such a technical concept, and hence a narrow scientific psychology would be saddled with this burden.

A second practical problem follows on from the first. If scientific psychology is faced with the task of developing and subsequently explicating a concept of narrow content fit to serve its explanatory purposes, then there will always be the possibility of internal conflict within the discipline. Of course conflict and disagreement is part and parcel of any serious scientific activity. But the kind of conflict that I have in mind runs much deeper and is more fundamental than any everyday scientific disagreement. For who is to say that scientific psychologists will agree as to what concept of narrow content is required or as to how the concept of narrow content is to be understood? But if there is no such agreement there will be little possibility of the communication and shared understanding within the discipline that is necessary for its long term health. In short, if scientific psychology attempts to go narrow, then there will be the possibility that its practitioners will come to operate with different concepts of narrow content or divergent understandings of what

narrow content is. And that this would be a likely upshot of scientific psychology's attempting to go narrow (rather than an outside possibility) is suggested by the level of disagreement amongst individualistic philosophers of mind as to how narrow content is to be characterised.

A third problem has to do with the determination and specification of the narrow contents of our thoughts. It is far from easy to determine and specify the narrow content of a subject's thoughts, or establish whether two subjects share a narrow thought. Or at least it is very difficult if we understand narrow content as Fodor does. According to Fodor, narrow content is a function from contexts to broad contents (or truth conditions), so that two thoughts have the same narrow content if and only if they instantiate the same function from contexts to broad contents. Thoughts with the same narrow content that are had by subjects that are embedded in the same context will thereby have the same broad content and hence the same extension. Fodor accepts that, strictly speaking, narrow contents are inexpressible. Any attempt to use a sentence to express the narrow content of a thought will fail, as that sentence will be anchored to a specific context, and thus will have some particular broad content. However, thinks Fodor, this doesn't rule out the possibility of specifying the narrow content of a subject's thought or indicating which narrow thought she tokens. This is because the psychologist can "sneak up" on the narrow content of a thought by mentioning the sentence that has the broad content that the thought in question would have (or its narrow content would determine) if it were embedded in the psychologist's context. For example, I can specify the narrow thought that Oscar! expresses with the words "water is wet" by mentioning the sentence "water is wet" for, as used by me, that sentence has the same broad content that Oscar2's thought would have if he were embedded in my context. I can do this by saying that

Oscar! has the narrow thought that determines the content water is

wet in my context. What this implies is that determining the narrow

thought of a subject involves determining the broad content that that thought would have were the subject embedded in our context and, consequently, that specifying a subject's narrow thought involves specifying the broad content that it would have were the subject embedded in our context.

This account of narrow content and the means by which the narrow thoughts of subjects are to be determined and specified implies that anyone who attempts to engage in narrow psychology faces some very serious practical obstacles. These are as follows: (i) Fodor seems to overlook the possibility that distinct narrow contents could overlap in their mapping of contexts onto broad contents. Despite being distinct functions the addition function and the multiplication function both map the arguments {2,2} onto the value {4|. Couldn't distinct narrow contents do something similar by mapping one and the same context onto one and the same broad content for one or more (but not all) possible contexts? If this is a possibility then in order to determine the narrow content of a thought, it will be necessary to do more than determine what broad content it would have were it embedded in one's own context. And Fodor's way of sneaking up on the narrow content of a thought isn't going to work, for it will not pick out one particular narrow content. To see this consider the following. Suppose a machine computes a mathematical function. In order to determine which function it computes it w ouldn't be enough to determine that for the arguments (2,2} it produces the value {4}, for knowing that wouldn't tell you whether it computed the addition function, the multiplication function or any of the other functions that have the value {4} for the arguments {2,2}. Similarly, to say that the machine computes the value {4} for the arguments {2,2} isn't to specify any one particular function. For just the same reasons, to determine that Oscar! has a thought that would have the same broad content that the sentence "water is wet" has on my lips were he embedded in my context is not thereby to determine which function that thought instantiates. What I have determined is consistent with his thought's having any of many distinct narrow contents. And the description of Oscar2's thought embedded in the previous sentence does not specify any particular narrow content. Consequently, a narrow psychology would have to do a lot more than Fodor would have us believe in order to determine and specify the narrow thoughts of the subjects under its study. So the question arises: how much more?

(ii) In fact, Fodor's account of narrow content implies that nothing short of determining the various broad contents that a thought would have over a wide range of possible contexts would be enough

to determine the narrow content of that thought. But if that were the case, what hope would a scientific psychology have of ever determining the narrow content of a thought? How, for example, are contexts to be individuated and described? And how, for each such context, is the resultant broad content to be determ ined and specified? The task looks close to being hopeless.

(iii) I suppose that it is not out of the question that distinct narrow contents just couldn't overlap in the way that m athem atical functions do. If it could be established that this were the case, then the argum ents presented in (i) and (ii) would be somewhat undermined. However, there would still be major difficulties in determining the narrow contents of the thoughts of individuals who lived in contexts other than our own, difficulties that are obscured by the concentration on twins in the literature. If I know that an individual is my twin, then I can thereby conclude that he has just the same narrow thoughts as I do. And if Fodor's m ethod of determ ining and specifying the narrow content of a subject's thoughts works, then I can read off the narrow content of my twin's thoughts from the broad contents of my own. But how am I to proceed with respect to an individual who isn't my twin? I can hardly determine the narrow content of its thoughts by determining the broad content of my own. So what am I to do? Determining that individual's broad thoughts wouldn't be enough for that wouldn't tell me whether those thoughts had the same narrow content as mine. And it is far from obvious how I am to work out just what broad content his thoughts would have were he embedded in my context. In short, a narrow psychology is going to have problems in dealing with individuals who inhabit alien contexts and who are not (or who are not known to be) twins of known earthly subjects. And surely the inhabitants of alien contexts who share our narrow psychology are unlikely to be our twins. Perhaps these problems can be overcome, but I reserve the right to be sceptical.

(iv) Of course there is no Twin Earth, and all the real subjects of scientific psychological research inhabit my context or a context closely related to it. This might appear to suggest that in the real world narrow psychology is a practical option; that it is no more difficult to engage in than broad psychology. For all we would need to do to determine the narrow content of a subject's thought would be

to sneak up on it via a determination of its broad content. And we could just as easily translate a broad explanation into a narrow explanation. But if that is all that narrow psychology is, then it is surely something of a scam. Suppose that Edgar, who believes that ferocious dogs savage runners, acquires the new belief that ferocious Fang frequents Brockwell Park. These beliefs causally interact to produce the belief that Brockwell Park is a dangerous place for runners. Fodor's comments would seem to suggest that constructing a narrow description and explanation of Edgar's thought processes would involve determining their broad description and explanation and then effortlessly translating it into something like this: Edgar has the narrow belief that in his/o u r context has the broad content

ferocious dogs savage runners and the narrow belief that has the

broad content ferocious Fang frequents Brockwell Park. These two

beliefs interact to cause him to have the narrow belief that has the

broad content Brockwell Park is a dangerous place for runners. To me

that explanation is nothing more than a thinly disguised broad explanation constructed by means of an exercise in broad psychology. A genuine narrow psychology would have to do much more than generate explanations like this; alluding to the narrow contents of broad states is just not enough.

But if a genuine narrow psychology would have to do much more than allude to the narrow contents of broad states, then it isn’t going to be so easy to engage in after all, even if, as a matter of empirical fact, all its subjects are locals. Consequently, engaging in genuine narrow psychology, constructing narrow descriptions and explanations of episodes of our mental lives, is going to be a difficult and messy business.

In short, then, narrow psychology faces some significant practical problems. It must develop and explicate an adequate concept of narrow content that finds w idespread acceptance w ithin the discipline. Yet in attempting to deal with this burden it runs the very real risk of generating internal dispute and conflict. Even if these problems can be overcome, say by the universal endorsement of Fodor's account of narrow content, it is questionable whether psychologists are ever going to be able to produce any genuine narrow descriptions and explanations. The difficulties presented to narrow psychologists by subjects that share our narrow psychology

but who do not inhabit our local environment and are not our twins will be particularly hard to overcome. And even the narrow psychologist who restricts her attention to her neighbours is hardly going to have an easy time of it.

Of course the existence of such practical obstacles does not in itself entail that scientific psychology does not, nor should not, attempt to go narrow. However, they do suggest that scientific psychology would be well advised to avoid going narrow if at all possible; after all, an impure psychology that we have a chance of making some progress in is to be preferred to a pure one which we have no realistic hope of engaging in successfully. I suppose that the main problem with broad psychology is that it is hopelessly parochial; the broad psychology that we engage in is a psychology of creatures like us living in environm ents like ours. It is blind to salient psychological similarities between us and our other worldly twins and cousins, and cannot capture the generalisations that subsume us all. But why should we worry about this parochialism when we have yet to discover any other-w orldly tw ins and cousins? If scientific psychologists restrict their attention to us, then broad psychology will work just as well as narrow psychology. After all, if narrow content is related to broad content in the way that Fodor describes, then a broad psychology of subjects who all inhabit the same context will, to all intents and purposes, be nothing other than a locally specific version of narrow psychology. What this suggests is that scientific psychology can, and should, reject the call to go narrow given the problems that it would take on board in going narrow. Given that we have yet to come across any other-worldly twins and cousins, the limitations of a broad psychology would be academic; as a matter of empirical fact, scientific psychology can get away with being broad.