NICHOLAS GEORGALIS RETHINKING BURGE’S THOUGHT EXPERIMENT It has been twenty years since Tyler Burge first published his fam- ous thought experiment. 1 The subsequent literature has been immense. Burge has responded to some of his critics and has developed the anti- individualist view presented in that article. This paper does not attempt to address the subsequent prodigious literature on the subject. Instead, I focus on serious problems in the original presentation that have been overlooked. Burge maintains that a person’s mental states or events may vary with certain changes in the environment, while the body of the thinker remains the same. This is the crux of his anti-individualism with respect to mental contents. The basis for this stems from his famous thought experiment. I will argue that the most that Burge’s experiment shows is that the truth values of certain of the thinker’s utterances will be different in the actual and the counterfactual cases he considers. At best the thought experiment is inconclusive with respect to the question of whether the thinker’s beliefs or contents are the same or different in the two situations. I argue on in- dependent grounds that the thinker has the same belief contents in the two situations. So, if I am right, Burge’s thought experiment, contrary to the usual analysis, does not support an anti-individualistic view of content. Of primary interest are the propositional attitudes, cases where a per- son has a psychological attitude (believes, desires, fears, etc.) towards a state of affairs or a proposition. It should not be assumed that the pro- positional attitudes are necessarily or essentially linguistic, at least this must not be initially presupposed. Thus, some nonhuman animals without any linguistic capabilities may, nevertheless, have propositional attitudes. Burge would agree with this. (Compare Burge 1979, 96, 114, and 115.) We may, however, express any alleged propositional attitude linguistically, be it our own, another’s, or some nonhuman creature’s. The sentence “Willard believes that gold is a natural kind” expresses what we take to be one of Willard’s propositional attitudes. This mentalistic idiom has an embedded sentential clause. Burge calls such embedded clauses ‘content clauses’ or ‘that-clauses’. He says that they “provide the content of the mental state or event” (Burge 1979, 74). There is a potentially dangerous equivocation lurking here between that-clauses, which are the publicly observable ex- pressions of the mental contents of attitudes, and the contents themselves. Synthese 118: 145–164, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.