ABSTRACT
Viewing a person as an Intentional system is viewing a person as working with information, knowing facts, believing statements. In Chapter 4 a number of obstacles were placed in the way of the centralist programme of associating verbal formulae (reports, statements of fact, commands, etc.) with events and states of such a system, and it might seem to be a corollary of this that the centralist, working his way up from the subpersonal, physical account to his merely approximate ascriptions of content, must necessarily fail to achieve the precision with which we speak at the personal, purely Intentional level of people’s beliefs and knowledge. The precision we find in our ordinary talk of beliefs and knowledge is an illusion, however, for the obstacles that face the centralist have their counterparts on the purely personal, Intentional level.
