To find out whether the narrow content of the thought that the lakes contain water includes a given scenario, I consider the hypothesis that the scenario is actual.
If I consider the hypothesis that an Earthly scenario is actual, I will conclude that water is H2O, so the narrow content of the thought that water is H2O includes Earthly scenarios.
Davidson's transcendental argument is based on his account of what it takes for a thought to have content, for which he argues that a process of 'triangulation' must occur, whereby the content of the thought someone is having is 'fixed' by the way in which someone else correlates the responses he makes to something in the world.
Although it feels a little uneasy to talk about syntactic properties of thoughts common-sensically understood, it seems that they are forced upon us by the very attempt to understand their semantic properties: how, for instance, could we explain the semantic content of the thought that if John is at the beach then he is happy without somehow appealing to its being a conditional?
However, Dennett's (1988) claim is that there is no mind-independent determinate fact of the matter about meanings or functions and that the functions of artifacts, the functions of biological systems and the contents of the thoughts of people are all dependent on interpretation, on our adopting either the design stance or the intentional stance toward them.
The account thus presupposes an independent explanation of the content of these thoughts.
Importantly, increased activity in midline DMN regions was also associated with reports of stimulus-independent conscious experiences, independently of whether the content of these thoughts was related to the SART or not.
Seeing the amount as well as the content of these thoughts can help you to target what things you should avoid thinking about or being around in particular.
The activation of lateral temporal regions in relation to stimulus-independent conscious experiences in this study might therefore reflect the access to the personal and general semantic knowledge that constitutes, in part, the content of these thoughts.
