By the lights of our commonsense psychology, then, to be in a particular belief-, desire-, or intention-state is to bear the corresponding attitudinal relationâ believing, desiring, or intendingâto a certain content.
Thought-Contents So-called folk psychology provides us with a rough-and-ready network of counterfactuals delimiting the role supposedly played by these internal states v- Ã -vis perceptual input, inference, and behavioral output in a normal member of our species.Instead, our topic is the ontological analysis of the internal states that occupy the nodes of this complex network and the bearing of that analysis on the truth conditions of the sentences we use to ascribe beliefs and related states. The relevant counterfactuals canonically describe particular belief-, desire-, and intention-states as states of believing, desiring, and intending that such-a- such.