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Famously, Wittgenstein asked the question “What makes my thought about you a thought about you? ” If I do have a thought about you, let's say that you are a part of the content of my thought. You are a part of what my thought is about. We can think about all sorts of things: objects (the Eiffel Tower), properties (being a famous landmark), relations (being East of London), events (the tower's construction), and thoughts themselves (the thought that the Eiffel Tower is one of Paris's most famous landmarks). This is not intended to be exhaustive, but to help broaden the question to “what makes one's thought about x a thought about x? ” We know we have thoughts about things. What we will be interested in here are accounts of how this happens. We will focus on thoughts and their contents, but beliefs, desires, hopes, wishes, intentions, and so on are often loosely considered thoughts. And Descartes, among others, would have included sensations as kinds of thoughts, but it is customary to consider them differently, since they are not propositional attitudes and do not have truth-values (though they may be veridical or non-veridical). Sensations clearly have contents and on some accounts ( Dretske 1995 ) there is a remarkable similarity to how they and thoughts acquire their contents. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s there have been several attempts to naturalize semantics. ... log in or subscribe to read full text