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This chapter sets out the metaphysics of the mental content of belief and desire that is the focus of the first five chapters of the book: Radical Interpretation. This says that the correct interpretation of an agent is that which best rationalizes the agent’s actions given their evidence. Radical Interpretation therefore combines two ingredients to ground mental content: a set of base facts involving an agent’s action and evidence, and a relation of rationalization. The chapter makes progress on the second of these, with the ‘bubble puzzle’ being used to argue that the relation of rationalized involved must be a substantive one. The best rationalizing interpretation of an agent will make that agent as morally and epistemically good as possible.

This chapter evaluates whether Radical Interpretation as it has been articulated in this book can be a reduction or foundational metaphysics of mental representation. One can be worried about this from two angles: first, whether it really qualifies as foundational metaphysics; second, whether what it targets is the whole of mental representation. Both challenges are addressed here. The chapter defends a reductive, foundational construal of Radical Interpretation against charges of circularity, while acknowledging a more modest fallback construal of what it achieves. It also shows how to extend the metaphysics of reference and truth conditions of the previous chapters to a metaphysics of Fregean sense.

This chapter is one of three that draws out the consequences of Radical Interpretation for how concepts represent the world. The focus in this chapter is on logical concepts: conjunction, negation, and universal generalization. This connects Radical Interpretation as a foundational theory of mental content to inferentialism, where commitment to certain kinds of rules of inference or coherence is cited to explain why our connectives mean what they do. Radical Interpretation, together with auxiliary assumptions about cognitive architecture and epistemology, predicts these patterns. One of the upshots is an explanation of how quantification over absolutely everything is possible, rebutting long-standing skolemite underdetermination puzzles.

This chapter is one of three that draws out the consequences of Radical Interpretation for how concepts represent the world. This chapter introduces a famous ‘moral twin earth’ puzzle about the normative concept wrongness. It appears to have a distinctive referential stability: individuals or whole communities can be very mistaken in what they think makes an act morally right or wrong, but somehow they remain locked onto the moral subject matter. This chapter derives this stability as a prediction of Radical Interpretation. Radical Interpretation predicts the result when combined with first-order normative premises and premises about the conceptual role of the concept of wrongness.

This chapter is one of three that draws out the consequences of Radical Interpretation for how concepts represent the world. A claim associated with David Lewis is that metaphysically fundamental properties are ‘reference magnets’—that if usage is equipoised between two candidate referents, the one that is ‘closer to the metaphysical fundamentals’ is the one that gets to be the referent. This chapter examines how such a thesis might arise as a prediction of Radical Interpretation. It looks to epistemology of inference to the best explanation to make a connection between concepts used in explanations and naturalness. The connection to concepts used in induction is discussed.