Davidsonian holism is thus a holism that applies to meanings, to attitudes, and also, thereby, to the content of attitudes.
Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the bird outside my window).
We've noted that skeptics about the expressivist program often complain that logical relations are first and foremost relations between the contents of attitudes and sentences that express them.
Without some better consensus on this enormous topic, we are not likely to get far on the question of mental causation, and solid progress on the attribution of content may still leave it murky how the contents of attitudes can be among the causal factors that produce behavior.
The view promises to offer a more plausible account of when two agents "believe the same thing," which Richard's own fine-grained account of the contents of attitudes cannot, as our intuitions about when two agents count as believing the same thing are often insensitive to difference in how agents believe what they believe.
In the literature on propositional attitudes beginning with Putnam (1975), the representational content of an attitude is generally thought to be "wide" in that it does not supervene on the contents of the subject's head; on this view, two molecularly indistinguishable people could have different belief or desire contents, determined in part by objects in their respective environments.
Propositional attitudes are then relations between a person and an ordered n-tuple that is the proposition that is the content of the attitude.
Because of the depression-related content of dysfunctional attitudes, we expected dysfunctional attitudes as a total scale to predict changes in depression exclusively and thereby moderate changes in alcohol consumption indirectly.
To these might be added the argument, due to Boghossian (1989) that "externalism" about the content of our attitudes (the view that our attitudes depend constitutively not just on what is going on internally but also on facts about our environment; Putnam 1975; Burge 1979) seems to problematize introspective self-knowledge of those attitudes.
Dretske (1995, 2004) argues that we have infallible knowledge of the content of our attitudes without necessarily knowing (or even having a very good idea about) the attitude we take toward those contents.
