Are There Different Kinds of Content?

Abstract

Proponents of the content view have usually held that the contents of beliefs are conceptual in the very strong sense that they are composed of concepts, and they have also typically wanted to deny that perceptual contents are composed of concepts. This chapter suggests that the question what kind of content perceptual and cognitive states have is, ultimately, a question about what kinds of representations those states involve. The representation of contents as structured allows us to state certain generalizations, such as the generality constraint, in a natural way, in terms of beliefs' contents, by representing the relations among contents that figure in those generalizations as essentially syntactic. Cognitive maps are obviously representational. Many of the points just made about cognitive maps have analogs for visual perception.

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