There are two aspects of any thought, judgement, or belief about the world: that of representing reality correctly or otherwise, the 'true/false' aspect; and that of influencing the subject's behaviour, the 'explanatory role' aspect. Both of these aspects depend upon the specific intentional content of the thought. In this collection of new essays, Daniel C. Dennett, Tyler Burge, Kent Bach, Stephen P. Stich, Colin McGinn, and Andrew Woodfield address themselves to the question of what sort of feature this intentional content is, which seems to operate simultaneously in two such different dimensions.

Among the topics discussed are what is really going on when one person ascribes content to the cognition of another; the notion of a 'language of thought'; and the relations between contents and objects of thoughts. Although the orientation of the book is fundamentally philosophical, it touches on issues of far-reaching importance for psychology, particularly for the scientific study of intentional phenomena. The volume as a whole makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate on representation, which has involved a wide range of researchers, from psychologists, philosophers, and linguists, to those concerned with artificial intelligence.

Andrew Woodfield is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.