Social Externalism and Psychological Explanations - The Problem of the Semantic Features of Contents

It starts to rain and I open the umbrella or, if I don"t
have one, I ask my colleague, who is walking with me, if he
has an umbrella in the bag. Why do I do so? There are
many ways to answer this question, but if I adopt the
strategy to explain the causes of my acting or speaking by
looking for the reasons that I have for doing it (for instance,
I notice that it is raining and I don"t want to get wet), I
commit myself to an explanation of a psychological kind
(Davidson 1980).
The following discussion tackles an internal
problem of psychological explanations concerning the
taxonomy (or categorization) of intentional contents.
Intentional contents define what beliefs, desires, hopes,
etc., are about. One believes that something is so-and-so
(for instance, one believes that it is raining); one desires
that something is going to be so-and–so (that tomorrow it
isn"t going to rain), etc. The content of intentional states is
the object of those so-called that-clauses: "it is raining" is,
for instance, the content of the belief that it is raining.