Searle's Narrow Content

Abstract

Putnam claims that two Doppelganger may be in type-identical mental states yet mean different things when uttering type-identical words because meanings are partly constituted by the 'external world'. Searle's internalist reply is that a speaker's concept determines what the word he uses refers to. I argue that if Searle's speakers are not Doppelganger but one speaker in two possible worlds (the actual and counterfactual, where certain superficially identical objects differ in internal structure), his token-identical experience(s) have different intentional contents. Searle's attempt to provide an internalist solution to the problems raised by Putnam's Twin Earth seems to fail.