Abstract

In giving psychological explanations in science and in everyday contexts, we explain how mental states cause actions in terms of the contents of the states. This thesis consists of three papers, each of which explores an issue raised by this fact. ;The first paper, 'The Anomalism of Psychology,' addresses Donald Davidson's claim that cognitive psychology is anomalous among the sciences, since its use of content as an explanatory notion makes it incapable of producing strict laws. His argument against psychophysical laws is based on the claim that the rational cannot be lawfully correlated with the rational. So construed, the argument does not appear to succeed. His argument that there cannot be strict laws within psychology relies on the claim that we cannot have access to all the causal influences acting in the psychological domain. Examination of these arguments suggests that the features of psychology which, for Davidson, are signs that it is incapable of producing serious laws, are actually consequences of the fact that it explains by functional analysis rather than by subsumption under strict causal laws. Since these are features shared by other special sciences employing this explanatory strategy, psychology is not anomalous among the sciences. ;The second and third papers are contributions to the debate about whether mental content is individuated individualistically, so that it depends only on features of the individual thinker. Tyler Burge has argued that physically and functionally identical thinkers may have different thoughts if they occupy different linguistic environments. The second paper, 'Constraints on Content,' disputes this claim of Burge's as he applies it to everyday discourse about mental states. Cases are presented which show that in giving common sense explanations of actions, thoughts are individualistically individuated. The conclusion is that thoughts are sometimes individuated with respect to linguistic environment, sometimes individualistically, depending on the purposes of the report. ;The third paper, 'Individualism and Semantic Development,' takes issue with Burge's claim that content individuation in scientific psychology is uniformly non-individualistic. The paper outlines current models of semantic development and presents a thought-experiment showing that psychologists in this field do not individuate psychological states with respect to linguistic environment. Possible Burgean objections to the individualistic interpretation of the thought-experiment are considered, and comparison is made with Burge's non-individualistic analysis of Marr's theory of vision.