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Purpose and Content1

Beliefs, desires and other so-called intentional states have contents: they represent states of affairs. Little could be more obvious than that. But what gives beliefs and desires their contents is not so obvious-at least not to those of us who, unlike Searle ([1983], Chs. 1, 10) and Schiffer ([1987], Chs. 6, 10), are unwilling to take the contents of our beliefs and desires for granted. It seems obvious to us that these contents must be some function of natural, nonintentional facts. But it is not nearly so obvious what this function is. And the difficulty of reducing the contents of our intentional states to non-intentional facts has notoriously led some naturalistic philosophers, such as Churchland ([1984], Ch. 2.5), to deny that we have any intentional states of mind. But as Fodor ([1987], Ch. 1) and others have pointed out, this is (literally) incredible. We shouldn't give up the idea that we have intentional states while any hope remains of giving a naturalistic account of them. And new hope has recently arrived, in the form of the Teleological Theory of Mental Representation (TMR): a theory which explains the contents of beliefs and desires in terms of their (biological) purposes. Not surprisingly, given the duration and difficulty of the struggle with intentionality, several philosophers have been quick to embrace TMR.2 But I fear that battle fatigue has blurred their vision. For TMR is wrong: not because beliefs and desires cannot serve