In this article, I study, from the point of view of the analytic philosophy of mind, the compatibility of students' ideas studies (SIS) with radical constructivism (RC). I demonstrate that RC is based on a psychology of "narrow mental states"; that is, the idea that the mental content of an individual can be fully characterised without any reference external to her or him. I show that this fact imposes some severe restrictions to SIS to be incorporated into RC. In particular, I argue that only qualitative studies can comply with the requirement of narrowness. Nevertheless, I propose that quantitative works can be employed as sources of "types" in order to study "token" actual students. I use this type-token dichotomy to put forward an outline of a theory of the relation between school contents and mental contents. In this view, token mental contents regarding a given topic can be defined, and probed, only by resorting to "typical" school contents.