I am beginning my myth in medias res with humans who have already mastered a Rylean language, because the philosophical situation it is designed to clarify is one in which we are not puzzled by how people acquire a language for referring to public properties of public objects, but are very puzzled indeed about how we learn to speak of inner episodes and immediate experiences.

    There are, I suppose, still some philosophers who are inclined to think that by allowing these mythical ancestors of ours the use ad libitum of subjunctive conditionals, we have, in effect, enabled them to say anything that we can say when we speak of thoughts, experiences (seeing, hearing, etc.), and immediate experiences. I doubt that there are many. In any case, the story I am telling is designed to show exactly how the idea that an intersubjective language must be Rylean rests on too simple a picture of the relation of intersubjective discourse to public objects.

    49. The questions I am, in effect, raising are "What resources would have to be added to the Rylean language of these talking animals in order that they might come to recognize each other and themselves as animals that think, observe, and have feelings and sensations, as we use these terms?" and "How could the addition of these resources be construed as reasonable?" In the first place, the language would have to be enriched with the fundamental resources of semantical discourse -- that is to say, the resources necessary for making such characteristically semantical statements as "'Rot' means red," and "'Der Mond ist rund' is true if and only if the moon is round." It is sometimes said, e.g., by Carnap{15}, that these resources can be constructed out of the vocabulary of formal logic, and that they would therefore already be contained, in principle, in our Rylean language. I have criticized this idea in another place{16} and shall not discuss it here. In any event, a decision on this point is not essential to the argument.

    Let it be granted, then, that these mythical ancestors of ours are able to characterize each other's verbal behavior in semantical terms; that, in other words, they not only can talk about each other's predictions as causes and effects, and as indicators (with greater or less reliability) of other verbal and nonverbal states of affairs, but can also say of these verbal productions that they mean thus and so, that they say that such and such, that they are true, false, etc. And let me emphasize, as was pointed out in Section 31 above, that to make a semantical statement about a verbal event is not a shorthand way of talking about its causes and effects, although there is a sense of "imply" in which semantical statements about verbal productions do imply information about the causes and effects of these productions. Thus, when I say "'Es regnet' means it is raining," my statement "implies" that the causes and effects of utterances of "Es regnet" beyond the Rhine parallel the causes and effects of utterances of "It is raining" by myself and other members of the English-speaking community. And if it didn't imply this, it couldn't perform its role. But this is not to say that semantical statements are definitional shorthand for statements about the causes and effects of verbal performances.

    50. With the resources of semantical discourse, the language of our fictional ancestors has acquired a dimension which gives considerably more plausibility to the claim that they are in a position to talk about thoughts just as we are. For characteristic of thoughts is their intentionality, reference, or aboutness, and it is clear that semantical talk about the meaning or reference of verbal expressions has the same structure as mentalistic discourse concerning what thoughts are about. It is therefore all the more tempting to suppose that the intentionality of thoughts can be traced to the application of semantical categories to overt verbal performances, and to suggest a modified Rylean account according to which talk about so-called "thoughts" is shorthand for hypothetical and mongrel categorical-hypothetical statements about overt verbal and nonverbal behavior, and that talk about the intentionality of these "episodes" is correspondingly reducible to semantical talk about the verbal components.

    What is the alternative? Classically it has been the idea that not only are there overt verbal episodes which can be characterized in semantical terms, but, over and above these, there are certain inner episodes which are properly characterized by the traditional vocabulary of intentionality. And, of course, the classical scheme includes the idea that semantical discourse about overt verbal performances is to be analyzed in terms of talk about the intentionality of the mental episodes which are "expressed" by these overt performances. My immediate problem is to see if I can reconcile the classical idea of thoughts as inner episodes which are neither overt behavior nor verbal imagery and which are properly referred to in terms of the vocabulary of intentionality, with the idea that the categories of intentionality are, at bottom, semantical categories pertaining to overt verbal performances.{17}