According to Stephen Stich, in From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (1983), "the notion of 'content' or the folk psychological strategy of identifying a mental state by appeal to a 'content sentence', despite all its utility in the workaday business of dealing with our fellow creatures, is simply out of place when our goal is the construction of a specific theory about the mechanisms underlying behavior" (p. 6). In this piece, I critically examine Stich's program for doing psychology without appeals to the representational content of psychological states. I argue that Stich's program must make appeals to content, if it is to achieve the goal of psychology that Stich acknowledges in the passage above. I also argue that Stich in fact makes what amount to such appeals. Lastly, I question Stich's belief that his program is presently needed, adopted, and supported by contemporary cognitive psychology.
Stich's main argument against folk or cognitive psychology's appeals to representational content is what he calls the replacement argument (1983, pp. 165ff), and it basically takes the form of Hilary Putnam's (1975) Twin Earth example. Imagine a place called Twin Earth, that is like Earth in every way (in objects, events, and states of affairs) with one exception: Earth has a substance H20 and, in its stead, Twin Earth has a substance XYZ. While these substances differ in their chemical natures, they share all superficial properties, e.g., taste, smell, feel, looks, drinkability, etc. The two planets are so much alike that they have twin human beings, e.g., Earthling Hither and Twin Earthling Yon, who have the same neurological structures down to and including microparticles. Given these states of affairs, are Hither and Yon in the same psychological state type when they learn to identify and make judgments about their respective Earths' "water"? If one's intuitions side with the construal of psychological states in what Putnam calls the "wide sense," viz., with extension being a determinant of state identity, the answer is no. How could Hither and Yon have the same psy-