Abstract: It is argued that externalism about the contents of propositional attitudes is supported not only by examples and thought experiments, but also by an intuitively plausible theoretical account of intentionality: the idea that the contents of intentional mental states should be explained in terms of the information that those states are disposed to carry. The theoretical account helps to bring out what is paradoxical about the externalist's thought experiments, and to show why attributions of content are essentially context-dependent.

Keywords: content, context-dependence, externalism, information, intentionality, mental state, propositional attitude,