2 th - century mental causation debates The problem for mental causation generated by externalism is that causation, intuitively understood, involves only the intrinsic properties of objects and events Externalist ways of individuating mental properties, however, render them extrinsic to a person’s body Consequently, they appear causally irrelevant to proximal effects To appreciate this, consider the causal irrelevance of the property of being a genuine dollar bill If you put a convincing counterfeit dollar into a soda machine, the power of that bill to get the machine to dispense a soda comes only from its intrinsic properties – its size, shape, and design The fact that the bill is counterfeit (or genuine), an historical and hence extrinsic property of the bill, makes no difference to the causal workings of the machine Under externalism, our bodies are like the soda machine and our thoughts are like the real or counterfeit dollar Our bodies respond only to what is proximally going in or around it, not to the contents of our beliefs 4.3.2 Solutions to the externalism problem Solutions to the argument from externalism pursue one of two strategies One is to deny the thesis of externalism for mental content (see Fodor 1980) The other is to deny that only intrinsic features can be causally relevant to proximal causal mechanisms (see Burge 1993) Let us begin with the denial of externalism The strategy here is to appeal to narrow content Narrow content is the content that intrinsic twins have in common; narrow content, by stipulation, supervenes upon the intrinsic properties of an individual (Fodor 1991) Think about the purely intrinsic features of the dollar bill – features that would be equally shared by a genuine bill and a counterfeit The intrinsic features are their narrow properties They supervene upon the internal properties of individuals and are thus shared by their physical duplicates Narrow content is the content one entertains under the Cartesian account of mental representation: as you entertain a thought of water, the content of that thought never ‘reaches out’ beyond your head Intentional properties, then, individuated narrowly, will be just as suited to causing behavior as any other internal properties of a person The appeal to narrow content certainly gets around the problem of causal irrelevance that faces externally individuated content, but the notion of narrow content is highly contentious Some have even argued that the notion is incoherent (see Adams et al 2007) Consider again the counterfeit dollar Surely we not value it just because it shares the same intrinsic features as the genuine article Whether a piece of currency or a work of art is genuine or a fake matters to us The significance of Putnam’s and Burge’s insights into the individuation of general terms lies in their observation about our ordinary attributive practices; they conform to the externalist model, not the internalist one The alternative solution is that there can be ‘broad causation’ (see Burge 1993; Yablo 1997) This view requires a little stage setting On this approach, there is the causation of bodily motion by neural properties, on the one hand, and then there is the causation of intentionally characterized action by broadly individuated mental 189