CONTENT ASCRIPTIONS AND THE REVERSIBILITY CONSTRAINT Richard Price All Souls College, University of Oxford We often make content ascriptions to subjects that are assertable despite being literally false, in the sense that the subject does not literally have the content that we are ascribing to them. The ascriptions are close enough to the truth, and in the conversational context it is convenient to be a little loose in one’s content ascriptions. In this paper, I shall give some examples of one kind of non-literal content ascription, and then propose a constraint, which I call the reversibility constraint, which distinguishes instances of this kind of non-literal content ascrip- tion from literal content ascriptions. I will then apply this constraint to looks- statements, and argue that the reversibility constraint can help us decide which looks-statements report the contents of visual experiences, and which do not. I will argue for the conclusion that ‘that apple looks to the left of me’ does not report the content of my visual experience when I do not see myself. I. In this section I discuss examples of non-literal content ascriptions. I might know that Peter, who is not in the conversation, believes that the UK has a population of 60 million. It might be salient to you and me in the conversational context that France has a population of 60 million. If you ask me ‘what does Peter believe the population of the UK is?’, I might trade on the established link in the conversation between the figure of 60 million and the population of France and answer ‘Peter believes that the UK has the same population as France’, even though we both understand that I am not trying to communicate that Peter believes the proposition that the UK has the same population as France. Here I am using the phrase ‘same population as France’ as a way of picking out the population that Peter believes the UK to have. What you understand me as communicating is really that the population of France is what Peter believes the population of the UK to be. Philosophical Perspectives, 19, Epistemology, 2005