The truth of a statement is defined as the correspondence of the judgment quality to its content, that is, the property of a judicative content by virtue of which acceptance (or its opposite, rejection) is prompted by purely objective motives.
Thus, they presuppose that if one were to build a genuinely thinking robot or computer, one would have to design it in such a way that some of its internal components would bear non-natural, non-derived content in virtue of purely physical conditions.
The core claim of a functional role semantics holds that a representation has its content in virtue of relations it bears to other representations.
On such a view, all representational states have their content in virtue of their phenomenal features.
For Reid, conceptions or 'simple apprehensions' possess intentional content in virtue of which these mental states are about other things.
But if our thoughts possess their content in virtue of our standing in complicated environmental social historical relations to our surroundings, it is hard to see how such contents could make a causal difference in our psychological economy, how they could figure in the production of behavior.
For instance, several theories say (in short) that a concept[5] has its content in virtue of certain causal relations the concept bears to an environmental referent (Dretske 1981, Millikan 1984 19899, Fodor 1987 19900; also, cf. Kripke 1972 and Evans 1982, ch. 6).
Today's virtue ethicists obviously don't think so, but they have nevertheless struggled to come up with an account of human nature that would give some definite content to the idea of virtue.
However, one could hold that experiences are so structured (by attitude and content), while also holding that experiences have their contents in virtue of their connections to beliefs.
This facilitates a response to versions of the Fregean puzzle involving definite descriptions, because sentences with co-designating definite descriptions have different contents, in virtue of the different conditions involved.
According to representational views, meaningful items, like perhaps thoughts or sentences or their constituents, have their contents in virtue of standing in the right relation to the things they represent.
