Rats are cuddly. I mean...cats are, but I typed an 'r' instead of a 'c'. Or was I temporarily misguided about the names of certain small mammals? In any case, I said something I didn't intend. Sorry. But why should we judge that I said that rats are cuddly instead of judging that I said that cats are cuddly in an idiolect which uses 'rats' to pick out cats? The answer arguably comes in two stages: first, 'rats' picks out rats in English because there is an established convention to use that squiggle and those sounds to pick out rats, and this 'rat'-rat convention originated in and is sustained by the intentions (most of them merely implicit) of a community of speakers to employ this convention. Second, my utterances are to be interpreted according to this convention because I have entered into a situation in which what I say is goverened by the English language (which contains the 'rat'-rat convention even if I don't realize it). This account of how we can say something we don't intend is certainly...

Although "mental content" is a term of art, and used in different ways by different philosophers, most take it to be the way--the proposition or information--that a mental state represents the world as being. My belief that Bush is president and my belief that Alaska is large differ in mental content--the first represents the world as containing a guy named "Bush" who is president, the second a large state called "Alaska". By contrast, my belief that it's sunny outside and my desire that it be sunny outside share the same mental content, though they constitute different attitudes towards this content. Even if this notion of mental content is clear enough, there are a number of important and unsettled issues surrounding it. One prominent issue is whether (and if so exactly how) the contents of our mental states are determined by features beyond the surface of our skin--most notably our environment and socio-linguistic setting. See http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/13 for more on this....