ABSTRACT
The Cartesian picture of the mind draws a sharp distinction between its contents and the contents of the world outside. The contents of the mind could be as they are whatever the contents of the world outside might be. Descartes himself notoriously believed that we could be totally deluded about the world, so that what we thought about had no correlates outside. We can call the doctrine that draws this sort of distinction internalism.1
It is not confined to the Cartesian picture, but surfaces in the classic functionalist one as well.2 Here, too, the contents of belief (and other intentional states) are taken to be independent of the external world they are beliefs about, in the sense that a belief could in principle be the belief it is even if that world which it concerns was quite different from the way it is.
