Concepts Are Beliefs About Essences

The most promising strategy to understand (sentential) narrow contents or (subsentential) concepts seems to be to conceive them as primary intensions or diagonals within the epistemologically reinterpreted character theory of Kaplan (section 14.1). However, this strategy seems to founder either at Block’s dilemma between a too syntacticist or too holistic understanding of narrow contents and concepts or at Schiffer’s problem that the character theory depends on functional role semantics without adding anything to it (section 14.2). The paper proposes a way of steering midway of Block’s dilemma without recourse to functional role semantics, a way perfectly summarized in its title (section 14.3), explains its content (section 14.4), and argues that it indeed overcomes Block’s dilemma while avoiding Schiffer’s problem (section 14.5).