## 1. Broad Aims



Many (perhaps all) mental states are about things, or are directed on
to things, in the way that a belief that spring is coming is about
spring coming, or in the way that a desire for chocolate is directed
on to chocolate. In the terminology re-introduced into philosophy by
Franz Brentano (1874/1924), such mental states exhibit
*intentionality*. Alternatively, they can be characterized as
representational states, or states with representational content.
Prima facie, the fact that mental states have content, i.e. the fact
that they exhibit this particular form of directedness towards the
world, is rather mysterious. Teleological theories of mental content,
like other theories of mental content, attempt to dispel this mystery:
they aim to explain how mental states can be about things, directed on
to things, or represent 
 things.[1]




In pursuing this aim, proponents of teleological theories usually
adopt a physicalist framework, and try to formulate a theory of
content that is naturalistic, or in other words a theory that is
consistent with the natural sciences and their presumed working
assumption that neither intentionality nor consciousness is
ontologically fundamental. Most teleological theories thus attempt to
show how intentionality, at its most fundamental, can be part of the
natural world, by showing how it can be understood as deriving from
other (non-mental) natural things.



In general, it is helpful to distinguish between two key questions
that teleological theorists are trying to answer. First, there is the
*representational status question*: in virtue of what do
representational states count as representational, i.e. what makes it
the case that these states have some content or other, rather than
having no content at all? Secondly, there is the
*content-determination question*: in virtue of what do
representational states have the content they have, i.e. what makes it
the case that these states have *this* specific content rather
than some other content? A full teleological theory needs to address
both of these questions, although (as we will see) there has been a
tendency in the debate to focus on the second one.



One important aspect of mental representations that a theory of mental
content needs to account for is their so-called
"normative" nature. We may evaluate beliefs as true or
false, memories as accurate or inaccurate, perceptions as veridical or
illusory, desires as satisfied or not satisfied, and motor
instructions as correctly or incorrectly executed. The mental states
we evaluate in these ways count as true or false, accurate or
inaccurate (etc.) by virtue of their contents, as well as by virtue of
other things (such as the actual state of the world). For example, the
truth of a belief that today is sunny depends on whether it is sunny,
but also on it being a belief that today is sunny. If the content of
the belief were different (e.g., if it were a belief that today is
hot) then its truth value might be different. The
"normative" nature of mental content poses at least a
prima facie problem for all naturalistic theories of it, given the
Humean warning against trying to derive prescriptive from descriptive
facts. Teleological theories share the strategy of explaining the
norms pertaining to mental content as deriving from so-called
functional "norms", which are regarded as descriptive
rather than prescriptive. We return to this in the next section.



In relation to the "normative" nature of mental content,
much attention is paid to the possibility of misrepresentation, since
the distinction between correct and incorrect representation is
arguably central. In fact, a capacity for misrepresentation is often
regarded as essential for genuine representation (see esp. Grice
1957). Some state *B*, for instance, can only be a belief that
today is sunny if *B* is true when the day is sunny *and false
when the day is not sunny*. In other words, *B* only
qualifies as a representational state of this particular kind if it is
capable of misrepresenting the world under certain conditions. And the
same holds, mutatis mutandis, for representational states of most
kinds.



A distinction is sometimes made between representation *of* and
representation *as*. Whether or not teleological theories of
content are concerned with representation *as* or *of*
depends on how those locutions are being used. Suffice it to say that
teleological theories are generally offered as theories of referential
content (i.e. of the kind of content that is tightly connected to
truth-, correctness- or satisfaction-conditions), rather than of
cognitive content or mode of presentation.



Further, the proponents of teleological theories rarely believe that
referential content is a kind of narrow content, and so they are not
usually offering theories of narrow content. How to characterize
narrow content is controversial, but the proponents of teleological
theories tend to agree with those who think that two beings who are
physical replicas at a time *t* "from the skin in",
so to speak, can differ in the referential contents of their mental
states at *t*. Of course, this view is also shared by plenty of
other philosophers, who think that mental reference to content
supervenes (in part) on things that are external to the individuals
whose mental states are in question, such as on features of their
social or physical environments and/or learning histories (perhaps for
the reasons given by Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979, 1986). Still, a
teleological theory of mental reference to content could be combined
with the view that there is also a useful notion of narrow
content. (See the entry on
 narrow mental content.)



A final point about broad aims is that teleological theories of mental
content are usually intended as real nature theories. Those who offer
real nature theories of intentional mental states think that our
everyday ability to recognize the intentional mental states of
ourselves and others does not make us experts on the fundamental
nature of these intentional mental states, any more than our everyday
ability to recognize water makes us experts on the fundamental nature
of water. Teleological theories of mental content do not entail that,
if Bill thinks that Mavis knows that today is Tuesday, then Bill must,
in so thinking, be thinking that certain teleological functions
pertain to Mavis's cognitive system.


## 2. Teleological Functions



While teleological theories of mental content are quite diverse, they
all share the idea that psycho-semantic norms depend, in part at
least, on functional norms. Later sections explain various ideas about
the nature of this dependence. This section describes the notion of
function employed. It is generally thought to be in some sense both
teleological and normative, but both "teleological" and
"normative" need qualifying, and the use of these terms
can lead to unnecessary misunderstandings. Let's take the first
of these terms first.



Talk of biological functions does often seem to have at least a
teleological flavor. For example, to say that it is the function of
the heart to pump blood can seem equivalent to saying that hearts are
*for* pumping blood, or that hearts are there *in order
to* pump blood (see esp. Wright 1973). There is also the closely
related concept of an artifact's function that appears to be
purposive: for example, when we say that moving the cursor is the
function of the computer's trackpad, we might mean that this is
what the trackpad was designed to do or was intended to do by the
computer's designer or user. Of course, if a teleological theory
of mental content is to be a non-circular theory of original
intentionality, the functions to which it appeals, as grounding
original intentionality, cannot in turn depend on other intentional
phenomena. (Some, but not all, prefer to use the term
"teleonomic" in that case.)



The claim that the relevant notion of function is in some sense
"normative" should also be read with care. What is meant
by it is generally just that, when using this notion, we (and
biologists) may speak of systems functioning normally or properly, as
well as of abnormal functioning, malfunction, dysfunction, functional
impairment, and so on. The relevant notion of function is one that
permits the possibility of malfunction. That is, it allows for the
possibility that a token trait has a function to do *Z* (in a
situation *S*) while not doing *Z* (in *S*), or
even while lacking the general disposition to do *Z* (in
 *S*).[2]
 For example, Joe's
pineal gland could have the function to secrete melatonin even if it
cannot secrete melatonin because of some internal damage. Whether it
is appropriate to describe the notion as genuinely
"normative" is unclear, since it is unclear what genuine
normativity requires. But all that is usually meant by saying that the
relevant notion of function is normative, at least by proponents of
teleological theories of mental content, is that the relevant notion
permits the possibility of malfunction, and underwrites the central
function/dysfunction distinction employed in biology.



Recall that, as mentioned earlier, the relevant functional norms are
understood by proponents of teleological theories of mental content to
be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Some prefer to reserve the
term "normative" for prescriptive contexts. On that way of
speaking, a statement would count as normative only if it entailed an
ought-claim without the addition of further premises. Proponents of
teleological theories of mental content may all agree that no
ought-claim follows from a function ascription without the addition of
further premises (for discussion, see Jacob 2001), and thus that the
relevant function ascriptions are not prescriptive and hence are not
genuinely "normative" if that is what normativity
requires. Different terminological practices dominate different
discourses, but it is worth remembering that talk of purely
descriptive "norms" is well established in some contexts
(e.g., in talk of statistical norms). If either psycho-semantic or
functional norms were prescriptive, the attempt to naturalize them
would seem to ignore Hume's warning to beware trying to derive
*ought*-statements from *is*-statements, but those who
offer teleological theories of mental content claim that the norms of
both functions and content fall on the *is* side of any
is/ought divide.



Those who favor teleological theories of content usually favor an
etiological theory of functions, according to which an item's
function is determined by its history of selection or by past
selection of things of that type. Roughly, on an etiological theory of
functions, an items function is what it was selected for, or what
things of the type were selected for (see, e.g., Millikan 1989a and
Neander 1991; important precursors are Ayala 1970 and Wright 1973,
1976). This idea can be spelled out in different ways. One influential
proposal stems from Karen Neander, who gives the following definition
for functions in physiology:



> 
> It is a/the proper function of an item (*X*) of an organism
> (*O*) to do that which items of *X*'s type did to
> contribute to the inclusive fitness of *O*'s ancestors,
> and which caused the genotype, of which *X* is the phenotypic
> expression, to be selected by natural selection. (Neander 1991, 74)
> 



Etiological theories of biological function need to allow for the fact
that ancestral traits might have been selected for something other
than the present function of descendent traits. For example, a
penguin's flippers and an emu's vestigial wings no longer
have the function of flight, even though ancestral forelimbs were
selected for flight. Griffiths (1993) and Godfrey-Smith (1994) offer
"modern history" versions of the etiological theory,
according to which functions are determined by recent selection. Note
that selection does not cease when traits "go to fixation"
if on-going maintenance selection is still weeding out fresh harmful
mutations as they arise. However, selection does require some
variation and Schwartz (1999) suggests that a continuing usefulness
supplement is needed, which kicks in if variation is absent for a
time. In the absence of any variation, the trait retains its function
if it is still 
 adaptive.[3]




It is important to note that standard etiological theories do not
entail that all functions are directly grounded in processes of
natural selection operating over an evolutionary span of time.
Millikan (1984) offers a theory on which functions can also result
from meme selection. Papineau (1984) speaks of learning and Dretske
(1986) invokes functions that depend on recruitment by conditioning.
Garson (2011, 2019a) argues that the notion of selection should be
loosened so that differential retention without differential
replication could count as selection, in which case neural selection
would qualify as a form of selection that could underwrite
content-determining functions. Finally, Millikan (1984) further
suggests that functions of novel items can be derived from the
functions of the mechanisms that produce them. While the contents of
sensory-perceptual representations might be determined by functions
that are directly grounded in processes of natural selection, it is
plausible to suppose that the content-determining functions for (most)
concepts are grounded in one of the other ways.



While etiological theories dominate the discussion of normative
functions in philosophy of biology, the etiological theory is not
uncontroversial. Some question whether teleology can be naturalized
(e.g., Bedau 1991). Others support other theories for other reasons.
Perhaps the systemic theory is the most popular alternative (see esp.
Cummins 1975). Systemic theories of function emphasize the role of
function ascriptions in functional analyses of systems. Functional
analyses of systems conceptually decompose complex activities of whole
systems into the activities of their contributing parts. The function
of a part is its contribution to the complex activity of the system
that is under analysis. Proponents of the etiological theory have no
objection to the idea that biologists give functional analyses of
systems but contend that the systemic analysis, on its own, fails to
naturalize the normativity of functions or to do so successfully (i.e.
it fails to provide an adequate account of 
 malfunctioning).[4] 
 Some who support a systemic
theory argue that biology has no need for a naturalistic notion of
malfunction (e.g., Davies 2001), while others argue that abnormal
functioning is statistically atypical (Boorse 2002, Craver 2001,
 Lewens 2004).[5]




It is usual to note that etiological (teleological) functions are
distinct from the causal-role functions involved in what is standardly
called "functionalism" in philosophy of mind. Causal-role
functions are often defined as a select subset of a trait's
actual causal dispositions, and functionalism is often defined as the
view that mental states are individuated or classified into types on
the basis of such dispositions (see, e.g., Block 1986). If causal-role
functions are a subset of dispositions actually possessed by token
traits then they do not permit the possibility of an important kind of
malfunctioning because a trait cannot have the causal-role function to
*Z* and at the same time lack the disposition to
*Z*.



That said, the distinction between functionalism and what might be
termed "teleo-functionalism" is less stark than might be
thought (cf. Neander 2017, 90). One reason is that formulations of
classical functionalism often spoke of the *characteristic* or
*normal* causal roles of mental states. Sometimes this was
explicitly to allow for pathology (see, e.g., Lewis 1980). Another
reason is that, although teleological functions are often said to be
selected effects or effects for which traits were selected, such
functions can also be described as selected dispositions or
dispositions for which traits were selected (Neander 2017, 127-130;
Hundertmark 2021). Both forms of functionalism also permit multiple
physical realizability of traits that perform the same functions.


## 3. Teleosemantic Theories



What all teleological (or "teleosemantic") theories of
mental content have in common is the idea that psycho-semantic norms
are ultimately derivable from functional norms. Beyond saying this, it
is hard to give a neat definition of the group of theories that
qualify.



An appeal to functional norms can be combined with a variety of other
ideas about content-determination. For example, there can be both
isomorphic and informational versions of teleosemantics. In the former
case, the proposal might be that the relevant isomorphism is one that
cognitive systems are supposed to exploit. In the latter case, the
theory might say that mental content depends on the information
carrying, storing or processing functions of mechanisms. (The relevant
notion of information is variously defined but, roughly speaking, a
type of state or event is said to carry information about some other
state or event when it is caused by it or reliably co-occurs with
it.



It is sometimes said that the role of functions in a teleological
theory of content is to explain how error (misrepresentation) is
possible, rather than to explain how content is determined (Millikan
2004, 63), but the two go hand in hand. To see this, it helps to start
with the crude causal theory of content and to see how the problem of
error arises for it. According to the crude causal theory, a mental
representation *R* represents that an *F* is present if
and only if *R*s are always caused by an *F*'s
being present. One problem with this simple proposal is its failure to
provide for the possibility of misrepresentation, as Fodor (1987,
101-104) points out. To see the problem, consider a mundane case
where Joan's belief that there is a cat (which is usually caused
by cats) is caused by a small fox. The crude causal theory does not
permit this characterization of the situation because, if a small fox
caused Joan's belief, then belief states of this type cannot
represent that a cat is present; instead, their content must be
something like *a cat or a small fox is present*. In other
words, as soon as the state of a small fox's being present
causes Joan's belief, it is included in the truth-conditions of
that (type of) belief and so, on this theory, there is no logical
space for the possibility of error: all candidate errors are
transformed into non-errors by their very occurrence. Note that the
problem of making room for error can also be described as the problem
of specifying the content of representations in such a way that error
is possible. So explaining how content is determined and how the
possibility of error are accommodated are not separate tasks.



The error problem is an aspect of what (after Fodor) is often called
"the disjunction problem." With respect to the crude
causal theory, the name applies because the theory entails disjunctive
contents when it should not. For example, it entails that Joan's
belief has (something like) the content *a cat or a small fox is
present* in the case just considered.



Asking how to alter the crude causal theory to allow for error is one
place to begin looking for a more adequate proposal. One approach
would be to try to describe certain situations in which only the right
causes can produce the representation in question and to maintain that
the content of the representation is whatever can cause the
representation in such situations. This is sometimes referred to as a
"type 1 theory." A type 1 theory distinguishes between two
types of situations, ones in which only the right causes can cause a
representation ("type 1 situations") and ones in which
other things can too ("type 2 situations") (Fodor 1990b,
60). A type 1 theory says that the first type of situation is
content-determining. A type 1 teleological theory might state, for
example, that the content of a perceptual representation is whatever
can cause it when the perceptual system is performing its proper
function, or when conditions are optimal for the proper performance of
its function. Not all teleological theories of content are type 1
theories, however. The theory described in the next section is
arguably a variant of a type 1 theory but some of the theories
described in later sections are not.



The following sub-sections describe some key differences among
teleological theories. It is not possible to describe all extant
theories but most major approaches are sketched, along with a brief
review of some of their strengths and weaknesses. General objections
to teleological theories are discussed later, in
 section 4.


### 3.1 Informational Teleoemantics



Stampe (1977) was one of the first philosophers in modern times to
suggest a theory of content according to which content is a matter of
reliable causes. Dretske's book, *Knowledge and the Flow of
Information* (1981) has also been very influential. The theory
Dretske develops in that book relies primarily on the notion of
information, but he later offers a theory of content that combines
both informational and teleological elements (Dretske 1986, 1988,
1995). He begins with a notion of information-carrying, which he calls
"indicating", and suggests that a representation's
content is what it has the function to 
 indicate.[6]




Dretske (1981) provides the most careful analysis of the indication
relation and he often refers back to it in his later work. However,
this analysis adverts to background knowledge, which is clearly an
intentional phenomenon, so it had to be modified in order to serve as
a basis for Dretske's theory of content. The modified analysis
runs as follows: an event token of type *R* indicates that a
state of affairs of type *C* obtains if and only if (i)
*C* in fact obtains and (ii) the probability of
*C*'s obtaining, given that *R* is instanced, is
one (assuming that certain background or "channel
conditions" 
 hold).[7]




Dretske points out that representation is not equivalent to
indication. "*R* indicates *C*" entails
"*C* obtains", so "misindication" (or
"misinformation") is impossible. Misrepresentation, by
contrast, is clearly possible. So Dretske (1986) suggests that
representations are states that *have the function* of
indicating. The starting idea is this: if something has the function
of indicating something else then it is supposed to indicate it but,
since items don't always perform their functions, room for error
has been made. (The analysis of functions Dretske relies on here
appears to be an etiological analysis of; see e.g., Dretske 1995,
7.)



However, Dretske (1986) sees a problem with this starting idea. He
illustrates the problem with the case of ocean-dwelling anaerobic
bacteria that have tiny magnets (magnetosomes) that are attracted to
magnetic north, which serve to direct the bacteria downwards into the
relatively oxygen-free sediment on the ocean floor . Plausibly, the
function of the magnetosomes is to direct the bacteria to anaerobic
conditions. If we "fool" the bacteria by holding a bar
magnet nearby and lead the bacteria upward to their death, this looks
like a case of natural misrepresentation. We were, in Dretske's
words, looking for "nature's way of making a
mistake" and we seem to have found it. The problem, says
Dretske, is that it is indeterminate how we should describe the
function of the magnetosomes. We can plausibly say that they have the
function of indicating the oxygen-free sediment. But we can also
plausibly say that they have the function of indicating geo-magnetic
or even local magnetic north. If we say the latter, no
misrepresentation has occurred. So Dretske's interim conclusion
is that we cannot count this as an unambiguous case of error, on his
theory as outlined so far.



A number of distinct problems for teleological theories go under the
name of "the functional indeterminacy problem"
 (section 4.1)
 and the magnetosome example can be used to illustrate several of
them. However, Dretske's response to the indeterminacy problem
that he raised suggests that his main concern was with what is now
often called "the problem of distal content". His problem,
then, is this. Suppose that we have a simple system that has just one
way of detecting the presence of some feature of the environment. We
have just seen a case of this for the anaerobic bacteria have just one
way of detecting anaerobic conditions (via the local magnetic field).
In such a case, if an inner state indicates the distal feature
(anaerobic conditions) it will also indicate the more proximal feature
(local magnetic north). Moreover, if there was selection for
indicating the distal feature, there will also have been selection for
indicating the more proximal feature (since the inner state indicates
the former *by* indicating the latter). Dretske further points
out that, even if a creature has several routes by which it can detect
a given distal feature (e.g., even if the bacteria can detect
anaerobic conditions by means of light sensors as well) there would
still be a disjunction of more proximal features that the
representation could count as representing, since it could still count
as having the function of indicating the disjunction of more proximal
features (i.e., local magnetic north or reduced light).



While we might be perfectly willing to allow that the magnetosomes in
anaerobic bacteria do not represent or misrepresent, the problem of
distal content generalizes. When you see a chair across the room as a
chair across the room, you represent it as a solid 3D object at a
distance from you and not as a stream of light reflected from it or as
a pattern of firings in your retinas. Otherwise you would not try to
walk to the chair and sit on it. An informational theory of content
must therefore explain how mental representations represent distal
features of the world, as opposed to the more proximal items that
carry information about those distal features to the representational
systems.



Dretske (1986) therefore modifies his proposal and maintains that a
creature that is capable of representing determinate content must be
capable of learning any number of new epistemic routes to the same
distal feature. In that case, he says, there is no closed disjunction
of more proximal stimuli that the representation could count as
representing. He speaks of conditioning in this context. The relevant
representation is recruited by conditioning to indicate the distal
feature rather than the disjunction of more proximal features, because
there is no finite time-invariant disjunction of more proximal stimuli
that it has the function of indicating. However, it is controversial
whether the presence of such a learning mechanism would, in fact,
solve the distality problem (for discussion, cf. Loewer 1987 and the
exchange between Garson 2019b and Schulte 2022).



The claim that misrepresentation is impossible without learning anyway
seems problematic, since it appears to preclude representations
produced by innate input systems, such as innate sensory-perceptual
systems. Some psychologists also claim that some core concepts are
innate (e.g., see Carey 2009). Later, Dretske (1988) appears to drop
his conditioning requirement as a general requirement for
(determinate) content, although he still maintains that instrumental
conditioning or other forms of learning are necessary for acquiring
the kind of content that can explain 
 behavior.[8]
 This re-raises the question of how representations produced by innate
input analyzers can have distal content.





In addition to the problem of distal content, Dretske's account
also faces a number of other difficulties. Some arise from his strict
definition of information and the notion of "channel
conditions" (Fodor 1990c), others from the notion of a function
to indicate/to carry information (Millikan 2004, ch. 6).



Despite these problems, however, Dretske's central insight seems
important and appealing. It is plausible that sensory-perceptual
systems have the function to produce representations that carry
information and that this bears on their content. An alternative
attempt to elaborate this insight is sketched later
 (section 3.4).


### 3.2 Biosemantics and Related Views



Ruth Millikan and David Papineau were the first to offer teleological
theories of content that put a strong emphasis on how mental
representations are *used* within a system. In this section, we
will mainly focus on Millikan's 'biosemantics', as
her theory is often called, while Papineau's account will be the
subject of the next section. Millikan presents her view in great
detail in her (1984) and develops it further in her (2004) and (2017,
part II); compressed versions are provided in her (1989b) and
(2009).



The core of Millikan's biosemantics consists of two claims. The
first is that all representations are, at bottom, messages sent from a
*producer* to one or more *consumers*. In other words,
representations always stand midway between (i) a producer system that
is supposed to generate them and (ii) one or more consumer systems
that are supposed to respond to them in specific ways. According to
Millikan, these systems must be designed to cooperate with each other,
either by natural selection or by a process of individual 
 learning.[9]
 (Note that Millikan's
terminology varies; in some of her writings, producers are described
as 'senders', representations as 'intentional
icons' or 'intentional signs', and consumers as
'receivers' or 'interpreters'.)



Since Millikan aims to give a fully general account of representation,
her theory applies not only to mental representations, but also to
representational devices that are used for communication between
individuals, such as animal signals, linguistic utterances, and even
maps and graphs. In these cases, it is whole organisms that count as
producers and consumers. One of Millikan's standard examples is
the splash signal that beavers use to warn their conspecifics: the
producer of this representation is the beaver that splashes its tail
on the water, and the consumers are nearby beavers that react to the
signal by diving for cover.



The producers and consumers of mental representations, by contrast,
are subsystems of an organism. In very simple cases, the producer is a
particular sensory system, and the consumer a motor system. Consider
the often-cited example of the frog that visually detects
appropriately small, dark, moving objects, and responds to them by
darting out its tongue. In this case, the frog's visual system
can be described as the producer, the internal signals produced by it
as representations, and the 'prey-catching system', i.e.
the collection of motor mechanisms that reacts to these signals by
generating the tongue-darting response, as the consumer.



The second core claim of Millikan's theory, in a nutshell, is
this: every representation belongs to a set of interrelated
representations, and the representations of this set must correspond
to certain other (usually external) states in a systematic way to
enable the consumer to perform its proper functions. Or, to put it
differently, (i) every representation *R* that is sent by a producer *P*
to a consumer *C* belongs to a set of interrelated representations that
*P* can send to *C*, and (ii) each representation of this set, if it is
tokened, must 'map onto' (correspond to) a particular
state of affairs in order for *C* to function properly (Millikan 1984,
96-102; 1989b, 283-290; and 2004, 71-86). The particular state that a
representation must map onto is, of course, the represented state of
affairs, the *content* of this representation. (Note that,
strictly speaking, this formulation of Millikan's second claim
only covers descriptive/'belief-like' representations;
Millikan's theory of directive/'desire-like'
representations and her account of 'pushmi-pullyu
representations', i.e. of representations that are at once
descriptive and directive, will be omitted here. For details on
directive representations, cf. Millikan 1984, 96-102 and 2004,
191-201; for pushmi-pullyu representations, cf. Millikan 1995.)



To unpack the second claim, let us return to the beaver splash
example. According to Millikan, a particular splash, produced by a
beaver in location l at time t, is really a complex signal, consisting
of the splash, the time and the location. Looking at the splash signal
in this way, we can see that it belongs to a large set of interrelated
signals consisting of the (same type of) splash in combination with
many different times and locations. Moreover, since the consumers in
this case are beavers that (typically) react to the signals by diving
for cover, it is clear that there is indeed a systematic
correspondence relation that must obtain between the splash signals
and certain states in the world in order for the consumers'
behavior to fulfill a biological function. To put it briefly, signals
of the form *splash at location l and time t* must correspond
to states of the form *danger at location l and time t*: if
this correspondence relation obtains, the consumer beavers (often)
escape from danger by diving for cover; if it is does not obtain, they
merely waste valuable energy. (This systematic correspondence
relationship is described as a 'mapping rule', a
'mapping function', or a 'semantic mapping' by
Millikan.)



There are two respects, however, in which our initial formulation of
the second claim needs to be refined. First, we should note that in
most cases, a correspondence between representation and represented
state of affairs is not strictly necessary to enable the consumer to
perform its proper functions; it is only necessary if the consumer is
to perform its proper functions "in the Normal way". By
this expression, Millikan refers to the way in which the
consumer's functions have generally been performed on those
occasions that were crucial for the proliferation or preservation of
this (kind of) consumer (Millikan 1984, 100; 1989b, 
 286-287).[10]
 Hence, to
identify the mapping that determines the contents for a given set of
representations *R*1, ..., *R**n*, we need to (i)
look at those past occasions where ancestral consumers of the relevant
kind made the type of fitness contributions that led to the
proliferation or preservation of consumers of this kind, and (ii) ask
which correspondence relationships between *R*1, ...,
*R*n and other states of affairs obtained in these situations
that help to explain how the consumers were able to make these
contributions. In the case of the beaver splashes, e.g., we must look
at past occasions where the ancestors of today's beavers
responded to splash signals in a way that made a crucial contribution
to their fitness (which, we may assume, are situations where they
responded by diving for cover), and ask which correspondence
relationships between the signals and other states of affairs help to
explain these fitness contributions. Presumably, these are precisely
those correspondence relationships between signals and danger that we
have identified above.



To incorporate this point into our formulation of Millikan's
second claim, we can restate it thus: (i) every representation that is
sent by a producer *P* to a consumer *C* belongs to a set of interrelated
representations that *P* can send to *C*, and (ii) it is a Normal
condition for *C*'s performance of its proper functions that
representations of this set map onto certain other states in a
systematic way, i.e. according to a particular 'mapping
rule'.



Another respect in which Millikan's second core claim needs to
be refined concerns the mapping rule that relates representations to
their contents. Millikan describes this relationship as an
"isomorphism" or "homomorphism" obtaining
between the set of representations on the one hand and the set of
represented states of affairs on the other (Millikan 2004, ch. 6;
2013b; 2020). The general idea is this: the mapping rule assigns to
every representation (of the relevant set) a represented state of
affairs, and does so in such a manner that transformation relations
between representations correspond to transformation relations between
represented states affairs. This condition is fulfilled in a
straightforward way in the beaver splash example, where
transformations of a splash signal that consist in the substitution of
a particular time *t*\* (for *t*) or location *l*\*
(for *l*) correspond to transformations that consist in the
substitution of *the very same* time *t*\* (for *t*)
or location *l*\* (for *l*) at the level of the represented
state of affairs. But it can also be fulfilled in more interesting
ways, e.g. by a set of sentences where the substitution of one name
for another ("Ginger" for "Fred") corresponds
to the substitution of one *object* for another (Ginger for
Fred) at the level of the represented states of affairs. (For an
in-depth discussion of this aspect of Millikan's theory,
cf. Shea 2013.)



Importantly, Millikan's second core claim is a fully general
thesis, and is thus intended to apply to systems of representations
that are more complex than the system of beaver splash signals. Take
one of Millikan's favorite examples, the waggle dance of the
honey bee. Different waggle dances do not only vary with respect to
the time and place of their performance, as beaver splashes do, but
also with respect to the length and direction of the 'waggle
run'. Furthermore, variations of the latter kind make a
significant difference to the responses of the consumer bees: the
length and direction of their subsequent flights in search of food
Normally depends on the length and direction of the waggle run. Hence,
we get a more complex mapping rule that takes us from dances with
different waggle run lengths and directions (performed in
location *l* at time *t*) to states of the form *nectar
source located in direction r at distance d (relative to location l,
at
 time t)*.[11]
 This is the rule that specifies the correspondence relations that
must obtain between dances and nectar positions for the consumer
bees' behavior to fulfill its biological functions (in the
Normal way).



One aspect of Millikan's theory that has received much attention
in the literature is the fact that it entails, at least in certain
cases, content ascriptions of a distinctive kind. This is well
illustrated by the frog example. Let us suppose, for the sake of
simplicity, that the frog's sensory-perceptual representation
belongs to a set of representations that only vary with respect to the
time and place of their occurrence, and let us call this the system of
'*R*-representations'. To find out what the content of the
*R*-representations is, according to Millikan, we must first identify
the proper function(s) of the frog's prey-catching system (the
consumer of the *R*-representations). Plausibly, the prey-catching
system has the function of providing the frog with food, since there
can be no doubt that the procurement of food was the fitness-enhancing
effect that ancestral prey-catching systems (in ancestral frogs) had
on former occasions that led to the proliferation and preservation of
such systems. In a second step, we have to figure out what the
correspondence relation is that has to obtain between the
*R*-representations and the world if the prey-catching system is to
perform its food-providing function in the Normal way (i.e. in the way
that the ancestral systems did it). The answer is, quite obviously,
that the correspondence relation has to obtain between
*R*-representations and the presence of *frog food*. Hence, an
*R*-representation occurring in location l at time t has the content
*there is frog food present in l at t*, rather than (say)
*there is a fly in l at t* or *there is a small, dark,
moving object in l at t* (cf. Millikan 1991, 163). (This point
will be discussed further in
 section 4.1.)



The central role that the representation consumer plays in this story
has led many interpreters to describe Millikan's theory as a
'consumer theory' or an 'output-oriented
version' of teleosemantics (see, e.g., Jacob 2000; Neander 2004;
Shea 2007). According to this interpretation, Millikan maintains that
the representation producer, while necessary for an item's
representational status, plays no role in determining its content,
which depends exclusively on the functional nature of the relevant
consumer. While there are many passages in Millikan's earlier
writings that do indeed suggest such a view (cf. Millikan 1984, ch. 6,
and especially Millikan 1989b), it should be noted that Millikan
herself rejects this 
 interpretation.[12]
 Moreover, it is
clear that Millikan puts greater emphasis on the
'input-side' of representational mechanisms in her more
recent work, and often stresses the complementary roles of producers
and consumers. In her (2017), for instance, she goes to some lengths
to argue that representations which are Normally produced always carry
natural information about their contents (where 'natural
information' is understood in a non-Dretskean way), and in other
writings, she even maintains that informational considerations of this
kind can be employed to answer certain recalcitrant objections to her
theory (as we will see below). This may suggest that Millikan's
original account, summarized above, must be supplemented with a claim
about natural information, but whether this is indeed the case is an
issue that cannot be resolved here.



Some argue that Millikan's theory has advantages in comparison
with Dretske's indicator semantics (see e.g., Godfrey-Smith 1989
and Millikan 2004). On Millikan's theory, a representation
*R* can represent that some environmental feature *F* is
present even if it was never the case that the presence of an
*R* guaranteed the presence of an *F*. It suffices, on
her theory, that *R*s mapped onto *F*s often enough for
the representation's consumers to have (so to speak) benefited
from that mapping. Hence, there is no need to provide independently
specifiable "channel conditions" for the mapping
relation.



It can also be argued that Millikan has solved the problem of distal
content for innate as well as learned concepts. Neither retinal images
nor light reflected from prey feed a frog. So it can be argued, in the
case of the frog's perceptual representations, that the Normal
condition for the proper functioning of its consumer (the
prey-catching mechanism) is that the representation maps onto frog
food, not that it maps onto light reflected from the prey, or onto
retinal images. 



One objection that can be raised against Millikan's theory has
to do with omnipresent beneficial background conditions. The *prima
facie* worry is whether her theory succeeds in ruling them out as
contents of ordinary perceptual representations. To stay with the same
example, consider that other things besides frog food were required
for a contribution to fitness on past occasions when the frog's
perceptual representation was used by the prey-catching system (e.g.,
oxygen and gravity). Does her theory entail that the frog's
perceptual representation has, in addition to the content *there is
frog food*, contents like *the oxygen concentration is above
18%* or *the local value of gravity is close to g*?
According to several interpreters, Millikan can easily avoid this
consequence. She can admit that there are many conditions that the
frog's representational state (state *R*, for short) must
correspond to if the prey-catching system is to fulfill its functions,
but insist that it is only those conditions that are *specific*
to R (i.e. that are not required, and do not Normally obtain, when R
is absent) that constitute R's content (Shea 2005, 40; Bergman
 2021, 3-4).[13]
 This would rule out conditions involving the
oxygen concentration or the value of gravity. (Interestingly, Millikan
herself seems to favor a different answer to the problem, one that
mirrors her reply to the next objection; cf. Millikan 1993, 127.)



Another objection to Millikan's theory is it yields content
ascriptions that are overly specific, and thus implausible. Consider
the fact that all sorts of circumstances could prevent a contribution
to fitness: for example, an infected fly or a crow standing nearby
could spell disease or death instead of nutrition for the frog (Hall,
1990). On this basis, Neander (1995) argues that Millikan's
theory has the unintended consequence that the frog's
representation has the content *food that is not infected, when no
crow is standing by* ... , etc. Millikan's reply to
this objection (cf. Millikan 2004, 85-86; 2009, 404) can be summarized
as follows: the frog's representation could only have this
highly specific content if the representation's
*producer*, the frog's visual system, had the function of
producing states that mapped onto such a highly specific state. This,
in turn, would only be possible if the visual system were sensitive to
proximal states that carried the information *that there is food
that is not infected, not in the vicinity of a crow, etc*.
According to Millikan, however, there are no such proximal states, so
the objection fails (for a critical rejoinder, cf. Martinez
2013a, 437-441). How this response relates to Millikan's
canonical statements of her position (e.g., in Millikan 1984, 1989b),
and whether it indicates a departure from her original view, are
questions that naturally arise at this point, but they will not be
pursued further here. 



Pietroski (1992) also argues that Millikan's theory provides
implausible content ascriptions, thereby entailing implausible
intentional explanations. His tale of the kimu is intended to press
the point. The kimu are color-blind creatures, until a mutation arises
which results in a mechanism that produces a brain state, *B*,
in response to red. Those who inherit this mechanism enjoy being in
state *B*, which leads them to climb to the top of the nearest hill
every morning (to see the rising sun or some red flowers). The result
is that they avoid the dawn-marauding predators, the snorf, who hunt
in the valley below and, solely as a result of this, there is
selection for the mutation. As Pietroski wants to describe the case,
*B*s have the content *there is red* (or *there is
something red*), and the desires that interact with Bs are desires
to see something red. The point of the story is that Millikan's
theory does not allow us to characterize the kimu in this way. On her
theory, the kimu do not see a visual target as red or desire the sight
of something red, given that it was not the mapping between
*B*s and red but between *B*s and snorf-free-space that
was crucial for the fitness of the kimu (and so for the selection of
any relevant consumers of the representation). On Millikan's
theory, *B*s mean *snorf-free-space* and there is no
representation of red in a kimu's brain.



Pietroski argues that biting the bullet is radically revisionist in
this case. Behavioral tests, he says, could support his claim. Plant a
red flag among a crowd of snorf and the kimu will eagerly join them.
It is consistent with his story that contemporary kimu might never
have seen a snorf and might be unable to recognise one were it stood
smack in front of their faces. Intuitively, the kimu do not represent
snorf, or the absence of snorf, in any way, according to Pietroski. He
suggests that this might be a problem for all teleological theories of
content. However, it is more specifically an objection to biosemantics
and closely related views (some other teleological theories of content
imply that the kimu do represent red, see
 section 3.4).



Millikan (2000, 236) agrees that her theory entails that the
kimu's *B*-states represent *fewer snorf this way*. She
argues that we need to distinguish between the properties represented
and the properties that cause representations. How else, she asks,
could a tortoise think *chow this way*, given that being
nutritious is an invisible property and so could not cause a
sensory-perceptual representation? Setting aside what a tortoise
really thinks, the worry is how a causal theory of content can allow
for the representation of that which lies behind the surface features
of objects.



Price (2001) offers a detailed teleological theory that is similar to
Millikan's. She defends Millikan's interpretation of the
mind of the kimu on the ground that it better explains their behavior
(Price 2001, 113-115). She endorses the idea that the point of making
content ascriptions is to rationalize behavior (as proposed, e.g., by
Davidson 1984 and Dennett 1987), and her claim is that a desire to
avoid snorf is a better reason to climb to the top of the hill than a
desire to see red. Different responses are possible. First, one could
argue that a desire to see red is reason enough to climb a hill.
Secondly, one could also question whether it is the role of content
ascriptions to rationalize behavior, or whether this is *the*
crucial role in the context in question.



In relation to this last point, one can ask more generally if some
content ascriptions are suitable for some theoretical purposes and
others for others. One might agree that folk psychological ascriptions
of intentional mental states are meant to rationalize behavior but
question whether this is their role in cognitive science. In the
latter case, the aim is to explain the psychological capacities of
humans and (in the case of cognitive neuroethology) other creatures.
Thus a question to ask is what content ascriptions would serve the
explanatory purposes of the mind and brain sciences, rather than our
folk psychological intuitions. Neander (2006) and Schulte (2012) argue
that Millikan's biosemantics generates the wrong contents for
mainstream (information-processing) theories of perception in relation
to the simple system cases discussed in the philosophy literature. A
principle of such mainstream theories is that, in vision, the
'deeper' properties of objects that are directly relevant
for biological fitness are only represented after the surface features
of objects are first represented (see, e.g., Palmer 1999). The worry
is that biosemantics and related theories entail that, at least in
certain cases, it is only the 'deeper', beneficial
properties that are represented in perception.



To a large extent, Millikan's theory has been responsible for
the great interest, both positive and negative, that philosophers have
shown in this general class of theories. Her writings on the topic are
extensive and this section has only touched on the basics of her
view.


### 3.3 Desire-First Theories



David Papineau's theory also emphasizes the 'use' of
representations in the production of behavioral output, but does so in
a different way than Millikan's account. In a first step,
Papineau (1984, 1987, 1993, 1998) identifies a desire's content
with the effect it is supposed to produce; then, in a second step, he
provides an account of belief content in terms of desire content.
Hence, his theory can aptly be described as a
'desire-first' version of teleosemantics.



In a bit more detail, the theory runs as follows. According to
Papineau, a desire's satisfaction condition is "that
effect which it is the desire's biological purpose to
produce" (1993, 58-59), by which he means that
"[s]ome past selection mechanism has favored that desire -
or, more precisely, the ability to form that type of desire - in
virtue of that desire producing that effect" (1993, 59). So our
desires have the function of bringing about certain conditions -
either conditions that enhanced the fitness of our ancestors in the
distant past (if the selection mechanism in question was natural
selection) or conditions that constituted a reward for us in the
recent past (if the selection mechanism was a mechanism of individual
learning). These conditions are the satisfaction conditions of our
desires or, in other words, their contents.



The truth condition of a belief, Papineau tells us, can (roughly) be
equated with "that condition which guarantees that actions based
on that belief will satisfy the desires it is acting in concert
with" (1993, 70). Suppose that I have the desire to get food
(which is, on Papineau's view, a desire with the function of
bringing it about that I get food), and this desire collaborates with
a certain belief *B* to cause me to go and look in the fridge. On
Papineau's view, it seems that we can say that *B* has the content
that there is food in the fridge, because there being food in the
fridge is the condition that guarantees that my desire to get food
will be satisfied by the action I am performing.



Both parts of Papineau's theory have been criticized. Against
his account of desire content, critics have raised two main types of
objections. First, they have proposed straightforward counterexamples
to the account: cases where a desire has *p* as a satisfaction
condition, but where it seems that the desire cannot possibly have the
function of bringing it about that *p* (Enc 1994; Loewer 1997,
116-117). These counterexamples include entirely novel desires, like
John's desire to bury his broken iPhone 12 under a Magnolia
tree, which lack a selectional history and thus, prima facie, a
function. They also include desires directed at actions that have
never been fitness-enhancing or rewarding, like the desire to commit
suicide, and desires that cannot contribute to their own satisfaction,
like the desire for sunny weather or the desire to change the
past.



In reply to this line of criticism, Papineau could appeal to the
compositionality of desires (in the way that he appeals, in the case
of a closely related problem, to the compositionality of beliefs; cf.
Papineau 1993, 75 and 82-83). In short, he could argue that once some
basic desires and beliefs have content, the concepts that are the
constituents of these attitudes acquire contents as well (in virtue of
the role they play within these attitudes), and these concepts can
then be recombined to produce further desires which may be entirely
novel, incapable of contributing to their own satisfaction, or
directed at actions that are neither fitness-enhancing nor rewarding.
However, this solution would have to be spelled out in detail in order
to be fully convincing.



A second line of objection against Papineau's account of desires
is that it leaves desire content highly indeterminate. My desire for
food, for instance, usually gives rise to a whole chain of events: the
occurrence of certain bodily movements, the ingestion of food, the
uptake of nutrients and, ultimately, the enhancement of my biological
fitness. Arguably, all of these events could be characterized as
"effects which it is the desire's biological purpose to
produce", so it may seem that the theory does not assign a
unique content to my desire. In a later paper, Papineau (1998, 9)
attempts to solve this problem by saying that a desire's content
is determined by its "specific function", where the
specific function of a trait is ''the *immediate*
effect it produces at the lowest level of description where it appears
as an unanalysed component in the functional analysis''
(Papineau 1998, 4; our 
 emphasis).[14]
 This move rules out contents
like *I induce the uptake of nutrients* or *I enhance my
biological fitness* (for the desire that is, ex hypothesi, a
desire for food), but it is controversial whether it succeeds in fully
resolving the indeterminacy problem (cf. Schulte 2019, 164-168).



Papineau's account of belief content, which is adapted from the
'success semantics' of Frank Ramsey (1927) and J.T. Whyte
(1990), also faces some problems. The first problem is that none of
the actions we ordinarily perform are based on a single belief. If I
go to the fridge to look for food, my action is not only based on the
belief that there is food in the fridge, but also on my belief about
the location of the fridge in my apartment, about my own current
position, about my physical abilities, and so on. Papineau (1993, 73)
recognizes this problem and proposes the following solution: his
initial formula should be applied to sets of beliefs on which actions
are based, and the truth-conditions of a single belief should then be
identified by comparing the collective truth-conditions of different
sets which contain that belief as a member. Even if this solution
works, however, a second problem remains: the truth of all the beliefs
on which my action is based still does not *guarantee* that my
action will be successful, not only because (for all we know) the laws
governing our universe are indeterministic, but also because my
success requires that a number of background conditions hold
(conditions involving gravity, the concentration of oxygen, etc.),
about which I may have no beliefs at all (Perry 1993). This suggests
that Papineau's account of belief content must be modified
further, but it is unclear how this should be done (for two different
proposals, cf. Blackburn 2005 and Nanay 2013).



Finally, we should note that there is one respect in which
Papineau's view has changed somewhat in recent years. In his
earlier writings, Papineau focuses on organisms with a belief-desire
psychology and is doubtful whether we can attribute determinate
contents to creatures with simpler mechanisms of behavior control
(see, e.g., Papineau 1998, 5). In his most recent paper on the topic,
however, Papineau (2016) proposes a new general account of content
that also applies to those simpler creatures. According to this
account, a representation *R* is always part of a producer-consumer
system *S*, and the content of *R* is the condition *p* that ensures that
the behavior generated by the consumer in response to *R* fulfills the
specific function of *S* (Papineau 2016, 100). For organisms that
possess beliefs and desires, the desire-first account sketched above
still applies, but as a special case of the more general
producer-consumer theory.


### 3.4 Causal-Informational Theories



The problems faced by use-oriented theories like Millikan's and
Papineau's have led some theorists to reconsider the
informational approach originally pioneered by Stampe and Dretske
 (section 3.1).
 One new theory that stands in this tradition is Karen Neander's
(2013, 2017) causal-informational theory of content.



Neander's starting point is the notion of a response function
(Neander 2013; 2017, ch. 6). She claims that sensory-perceptual
systems have such response functions, where to 'respond'
to something is to be caused by it to do something else. For example,
a visual system might be caused by a red instantiation to change into
a RED state, and it might have been selected (in part) for being
disposed to do so. This means, according to Neander, that the system
has the function to respond to red instances by changing into a RED
state.



On Neander's view, the resulting states (like, e.g., RED) are
representations of the causes to which the system is supposed to
respond by producing these states. They are, so to speak,
representations of their 'Normal causes'. On this view,
RED has the content *red is present* if the visual system that
produces RED has the function to produce it in response to the
presence of red, or more specifically in response to red being
instanced in the receptive field of the perceptual processing pathways
responsible for RED's production. Since
'information' is defined in causal terms by Neander, she
can also state her view by saying that RED has the content *red is
present* because it is supposed to carry the information that red
is present (Neander 2017, 146). This is Neander's basic idea,
though two further requirements are added. One is a second-order
similarity requirement (Neander 2017, ch. 8) that we will set aside
here.



The other is a requirement that is designed to solve the problem of
distal content, i.e. to exclude states that are too proximal (the
Prox-Cs, for short) from the contents of sensory representations. With
the addition of this requirement, Neander's analysis looks as
follows:



> 
> A sensory-perceptual representation, *R*, in a
> sensory-perceptual system *S*, has the descriptive content
> *C is present* and not *Prox-C is present* if:
> 
> 1. *S* was selected for producing *R*s in response to
> *C*s and,
> 2. if *S* was selected for producing *R*s in response
> to both *C*s and *Prox-C*s, it was selected for
> producing *R*s in response to *Prox-C*s because this was
> a means to its producing *R*s in response to *C*s and
> not *vice-versa* (cf. Neander 2013, 34; 2017, 222).
> 
> 
> 



Note first that clause (1) on its own does not determine suitably
distal content because there is a causal chain leading from *C*
to *R* and, if the system had been selected for responding to
*C*s by producing *R*s, it must also have been selected
for responding to the proximal items (the *Prox-C*s) in the
causal chain (such as the light reflected from *C*s toward the
retina of the eye, in the case of visual perception). There is,
however, an asymmetry, to which clause (2) appeals. The system was
selected for its disposition to respond to the proximal items because
by that means it responded to the more distal items, but the system
was not selected for responding to the more distal item because by
that means it responded to the more proximal items. This is why
*C*, rather than one of the *Prox-C*s, qualifies as the
content of *R*.



Clause (1), which articulates the basic idea of Neander's
approach, ensures different content ascriptions to those generated by
biosemantics and other 'use-oriented' theories. For
example, consider again the notorious case of the frog. Plausibly, the
relevant visual pathways in the frog's brain were selected for
their disposition to be caused by a certain configuration of visible
features (roughly, something's being small, dark and moving) to
produce the sensory-perceptual representation in question, as well as
for their disposition to initiate orienting and so on thereby. They
were plausibly selected for this preferential response to the
configuration of visible features because things with these features
were often enough nutritious for the frog. The visual pathways in the
frog were not selected for a disposition to respond to the nutritional
value of a stimulus, however. For the normal frog's visual
system has no causal sensitivity to the nutritional value of the
stimulus and cannot have been selected for a causal sensitivity it did
not have. So, on this proposal, the visual content of the
representation is *there's something small, dark, moving*(or something along these lines) rather than *there's
frog food*. (For analogous reasons, Pietroski's kimus are
characterized as representing the presence of red, not the absence of
snorf; cf. the discussion in
 section 3.2.)



According to Neander (2006) the configuration of visible features is
the right style of visual content to ascribe for the purpose of
mainstream scientific explanations of an anuran's visual
capacities (see also Neander 2017, ch. 5). Nor does this proposal seem
to generate overly specific contents of the kind mentioned earlier in
relation to Millikan's biosemantics. On Neander's theory,
the frog does not represent the stimulus as not carrying an infectious
disease, even if only those small, dark and moving things that were
not carrying an infectious disease contributed to frog fitness when
the frog was fed. Sensory-perceptual systems can only have been
selected for causal dispositions which past systems of the type
possessed. Since past systems had no disposition to respond
preferentially to the absence of an infectious disease in visual
stimuli that were small, dark and moving, the fact that contributions
to fitness were made only on those occasions when an infectious
disease was absent is, again, a background evolutionary fact that is
not content-constitutive on this proposal.



One possible concern is whether sufficient room for misrepresentation
has been made. Some early discussions of teleological theories of
content assumed that the content of the frog's representation
must be *there's frog food* or *there's a
fly* or else misrepresentation would be impossible. On
Neander's view, the frog would not be in error when it snapped
at something small, dark and moving that was not frog food, or not a
fly. However, misrepresentation is possible on this proposal. A
representation that is supposed to be produced in response to
something that is small, dark and moving and is instead produced in
response to something large and looming would count as misrepresenting
and a neurologically damaged frog (e.g., one with a damaged thalamus)
will indeed attempt to catch all sorts of inappropriate things (e.g.,
an experimenter's hand or even the frog's own limbs).
Neander's theory also entails that a kimu's
*B*-state will misrepresent if it is tokened in response to
anything that is not red. More importantly, perhaps, it seems to
entail that human REDs will misrepresent if tokened in response to
something not-red, as could happen in color contrast illusions or in
unusual viewing conditions.



As Millikan (2013a) and others have pointed out, there are
representations that cannot be caused by their contents, such as
TOMORROW. No tomorrow has ever caused a thought about tomorrow.
However, TOMORROW is not a sensory-perceptual representation and so
this is not an objection to Neander's proposal per se. As with
other modest theories, however, the challenge is explaining how to
link this modest theory for some mental contents to a more
comprehensive theory that accounts for all of the contents of all of
our concepts (see also
 section 4.4).



Neander's theory has been the focus of much discussion in recent
years. A number of critics have taken issue with Neander's
solution to the distality problem. Price (2014) and Artiga (2015)
question whether the 'distality principle' (i.e. the
second clause of the analysis presented above) is really consistent
with Neander's basic idea. Schulte (2018, 2022) defends the
consistency of Neander's view, but argues that it yields
problematic content ascriptions in certain hypothetical cases and,
arguably, also in actual cases (e.g. cases of olfactory perception).
He then develops a modified version of the causal-informational theory
that is supposed to avoid these 
 consequences.[15]




Another aspect of Neander's theory that has been criticized is
her causal requirement: the claim that properties can only enter into
the content of a sensory-perceptual representation *R* if they are
causally relevant for bringing it about that *R* is tokened. Green
(2017) argues that this requirement, as spelled out by Neander (2017,
270-271), has the counterintuitive consequence that visual
representations that appear to represent an object as moving through
adjacent regions of space ('something moves from region 1 to
region 2 to ...') actually represent the successive
occurrence of object presences in those regions ('something is
in region 1, then something is in region 2, then ...').
Ganson (2021a) also takes issue with the causal requirement. He
contends that Neander cannot accommodate distance representations that
are generated on the basis of visual cues that are statistically, but
not causally related to the distance of perceived objects.



Whether Neander's theory or some other version of
causal-informational teleosemantics can overcome these problems will
be a matter for future discussion.


### 3.5 Other Views



Recent years have seen a considerable revival of the naturalistic
program in general, and teleosemantics in particular. In addition to
new work by Millikan, Neander and Papineau, there have been a number
of significant contributions by other authors as well. Some of these
are presented in this section; others, which are more closely
concerned with particular problems for the teleosemantic approach,
will be discussed in 
 section 4. 



Among the new approaches, one of the most influential is Nicholas
Shea's "varitel semantics", which is carefully
worked out in his (2018). Although this theory stands firmly in the
tradition of Millikan and Papineau, it has a number of novel and
distinctive features. According to Shea, representational systems are
characterized by three features, which are usually found together in
nature, and which have to do with the production of
'outcomes' (i.e. movements, actions, or the consequences
of actions). More specifically, the outcomes produced by
representational systems are (i) "robust", (ii)
"stabilized", and (iii) they are being brought about by
mechanisms "in which internal components stand in exploitable
relations to relevant features of the environment" (Shea 2018,
51). Let us look at these three characteristics in turn.



First, the production of an outcome *F* is supposed to be
*robust*. In Shea's terminology, this means that *F* is
produced (a) "in response to a range of different inputs"
and (b) "in a range of different relevant external
conditions" (Shea 2018, 55). Depending on the ranges in
question, the production of *F* can be described as more or less robust.
Of particular importance is clause (a) of the definition, since it is
demanding enough to exclude certain outcomes completely. If, for
example, a plant closes its flowers only in response to a change in
temperature, then the flower-closing behavior does not qualify as a
robust outcome. However, if the plant also closes its flowers in
response to some other input, e.g. a change in light levels, then the
behavior does count as (minimally) robust (Shea 2018, 213-214).



Secondly, the production of outcome *F* by system *S* is supposed to have
been stabilized by a process of natural selection, a process of
individual learning, or by having contributed to the survival of S. In
other words, *F* must be an etiological function of S, although it
should be noted that Shea expands the processes that can ground such
functions by including past contributions to survival in addition to
natural selection and learning. (Furthermore, Shea allows that
representational systems may have *design functions* instead of
stabilized functions, so stabilization is not strictly necessary for
representation; cf. Shea 2018, 64-65.)



Thirdly, the production of outcome *F* by system *S* must involve a
mechanism with internal components (vehicles) that stand in
exploitable relations to environmental features. In many cases, the
exploitable relations in question are *informational*: the
mechanism's internal components carry correlational information
about the presence of certain features in the environment (Shea 2018,
 ch. 4).[16] 
 In other cases, the exploitable relations are relations
of *structural correspondence*: the mechanism's internal
components stand in relations to each other that 'mirror'
relations between entities in the external world (Shea 2018,
ch. 5). Furthermore, there may still be other types of exploitable
relations. This pluralism about the relations that are constitutive of
representational content is one of the reasons why Shea names his
approach "varitel semantics" (Shea 2018, 43). 



One respect in which Shea's approach is very attractive is the
fact that he pays close attention to the explanatory role of
representations, and offers a detailed argument for the claim that his
theory can account for the "explanatory purchase" of
representational properties (Shea 2018, ch. 8). Another potential
advantage is the fact that Shea does not rely on the producer-consumer
model that has long dominated in the teleosemantics literature, and
instead adopts a more flexible framework that allows for highly
interconnected representational systems that cannot be cleanly
separated into subsystems (Shea 2018, 19).



However, there also several respects in which the theory may appear
problematic. Some critics object that Shea's way of drawing the
distinction between representational and non-representational systems
is unconvincing, either because his requirements for representational
status are too weak (Rescorla 2021, Kracauer 2022), or because the
distinction is not significant from an explanatory point of view
(Ganson 2021b, 287). Other theorists have criticized Shea's
claims about the explananda (Rupert 2022) and the utility (Egan 2020)
of representational explanations. (For replies to some of these
objections, cf. Shea 2020 and 2022.) Finally, given that Shea's
account of content determination resembles those of Millikan and
Papineau, one may wonder whether some of their problems (especially
the problem of overly specific contents) are also problems for
Shea.



There is another family of views that has gained some prominence in
recent years, and that should be discussed in this section. What
distinguishes these views from standard teleosemantic theories is the
fact that they combine a teleological theory of content with a
non-etiological account of function (Schroeder 2004; Nanay 2014; Bauer
2017; Piccinini 
 2020a).[17]




Nanay's (2014) proposal, for instance, combines a broadly
Dretskean version of informational teleosemantics with Nanay's
own modal theory of functions (Nanay 2010). Like Dretske, Nanay
maintains that representing something consists in "having the
function to indicate (carry information about)" it (Nanay 2014,
799). However, it should be noted that he restricts this account to
"pragmatic representations", which are defined as the
representations that are most directly involved in the guidance of
actions (Nanay 2014, 805). His account of content can thus be
summarized as follows: for any pragmatic representation *R*, *R*
represents that *p* iff *R* has the function of indicating (carrying the
information) that *p*. This account of content is then combined with
Nanay's modal theory of functions which says, roughly speaking,
that a (token) trait of an organism has the function to do *X* if doing
*X* would contribute to the organism's fitness. Accordingly, a
rough formulation of Nanay's theory says that a pragmatic
representation *R* of an organism *O* represents that *p* iff *R*'s
indicating (carrying the information) that *p* would contribute to
*O*'s fitness (Nanay 2014, 804). 



The main advantage of Nanay's proposal is that it is a
thoroughly non-historical account of content. As such, it avoids the
difficulties of standard teleosemantic accounts that arise from the
assumption that content properties are determined by selectional
history, like the Swampman problem 
 (section 4.2), or problems
concerning our epistemic access to content properties. On the other
hand, the modal theory of function that serves as the basis for
Nanay's account has been heavily criticized (Artiga 2014, Garson
2019c), and there are also some more specific objections to his
treatment of representational content (cf. Bauer 2017; Hundertmark
2018, 156-170).



A different non-etiological version of teleosemantics has recently
been developed by Piccinini (2020a, 2020b). Piccinini (2020a) also
starts with a version of informational teleosemantics, restricted to
sensory representations. Simplifying a bit, his account says that a
sensory representation *R* has the content <*p*> if (i) *R*'s
producer has the function of generating *R* so that *R* carries the
information that *p*, and (ii) *R* can guide the agent's behavior
with respect to the fact that *p* (Piccinini 2020a, 263). (This account
is extended to other types of representation in Piccinini 2020b.) In a
further step, Piccinini combines his teleological analysis of content
with a so-called goal-contribution theory of function (Piccinini
2020a, ch. 3; Maley & Piccinini 2017). This theory construes
biological functions as regular contributions to the (objective)
biological goals of an organism, where these goals include survival,
development, reproduction and helping others (especially offspring and
relatives). 



This theory of function is not completely ahistorical, since the
population relevant for determining whether a trait makes a
*regular* contribution to fitness may extend into the past
(Maley & Piccinini 2017, 245, fn 10), but it does make functions
much less dependent on historical facts than they are on etiological
accounts. This fact may be used to argue that Piccinini's
account has advantages over standard teleosemantic theories when it
comes to problems concerning our epistemic access to contents. But
whether this is the case, and whether the theory can avoid the
difficulties that plague other non-etiological versions of
teleosemantics, is a topic for future discussions.


## 4. Problems for Teleosemantics



The preceding survey of teleological theories of content does not
mention all of the extant teleological theories but it illustrates
some of the commonalities and differences among them. Now we turn to
some objections that have been raised against the general idea of
teleosemantics. This section looks at the objections that have been
most 
 influential.[18]
 Some have already been touched on in previous sections.


### 4.1 Functional Indeterminacy



There are several potential indeterminacy problems (for a survey, cf.
Neander 2017, ch. 7). In addition to the problem of distal content,
which has already been discussed above two other indeterminacy
problems are especially prominent. 



The first, raised by Fodor (1990b), is the problem of locally
co-instantiated 
 properties.[19]
 Fodor's example is the familiar case of the frog that snaps at
anything that is suitably small, dark and moving and thereby feeds
itself (see 
 section 3.2). 
 For the sake of the argument, Fodor makes
the (unrealistic) assumption that the property of being small, dark
and moving and the property of being a fly are always co-instantiated
in the frog's environment, such that all flies are small, dark,
moving things, and vice versa. According to Fodor, if it was adaptive
for the frog to snap at flies then it was equally adaptive for it to
snap at small, dark, moving things. Hence, when we look at the
frog's detection device, we can equally well say that the
function of the device is to detect flies *and* that its
function is to detect small, dark, moving things. So, if we try to
determine the content of the representation by reference to the
function of the detection mechanism, the content remains
indeterminate. We can choose to describe the function one way or
another but if the content depends on how we choose to describe the
function it is not a naturalized content. Note that the candidate
contents *there's a fly* and *there's frog
food* and *there's a small, dark moving thing* each
license different assessments concerning misrepresentation. If the
frog is representing the stimulus as a fly, for instance, it will
misrepresent a small, dark, moving non-fly as a fly. If it represents
the stimulus as a small, dark, moving thing, this will not be the
case.



The second prominent indeterminacy problem is the problem of
properties mutually implicated in selection. It stems from the fact
that traits are selected for complex causal roles. Consider, for
example, an antelope population where an altered hemoglobin shape was
selected for because it (i) increased oxygen uptake, (ii) which
allowed the antelopes to move to higher ground, (iii) which gave them
access to richer pasture in summer, (iv) and so improved their
nutritional status, their immunity to disease, their vigor in avoiding
predation, their attraction to mates and (v) their chances of survival
and reproduction (Neander 1995). To determine the function of a trait,
such as the altered shape of the hemoglobin, the etiological theory of
functions tells us to ask, "what did past instances do that was
adaptive and that caused traits of that type to be selected?".
In this case, the answer is (i) through (v). The altered shape of the
hemoglobin did all of this, and all of this was adaptive, and all of
this contributed to the selection of the trait (i.e., it was selected
*for* all of this). So all of this would seem to be the
trait's 
 function.[20]
 Its function is the complex causal role for which it was
selected.



The problem for content can be seen when we consider mechanisms that
produce or consume representations. For instance, the frog's
detection device was selected because it (a) responded to small, dark,
moving things and (b) that helped the frog catch these things, and (c)
that provided the frog with nutrients and (d) that contributed to the
frog's chances of survival and reproduction in various ways.
Thus ancestral detection devices contributed to the selection of that
type of device by way of a complex causal route in which the visible
configuration of the stimulus and the nutritional properties of the
stimulus both play a role. Note that this does not depend on these
features of the environment being locally co-instantiated. Even if not
all small, dark and moving things were nutritious and not all
nutritious things were small, dark and moving in the frog's
natural habitat, this problem of complex causal roles would still
remain. The problem is that the systems responsible for the production
and the consumption of representations were selected for complex
causal roles in which a number of environmental features were
involved.



While these two problems might be fatal to simple teleological
theories of content, it is clear that the theories which are currently
at the center of discussion have ample resources to deal with them. On
Neander's causal-information theory, for example, the content of
the frog's sensory-perceptual representation is not
indeterminate between *there's a small, dark, moving
object*, *there's a fly* and *there's frog
food* (whether the relevant properties are locally co-instantiated
or not). The reason is that the frog's visual system was not
selected for producing the relevant sensory-perceptual representation
*in response* to objects of order *Diptera* (flies), or
to objects with nutritional value (frog food). A frog's visual
system is not causally sensitive to an object's nutritiousness,
or to its membership in the order *Diptera*, and could not have
been selected for a causal sensitivity it did not have (see 
 section 3.4). 
 The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for Millikan's
teleological theory, which entails that the frog's
representation has the content *there's frog food* rather
than *there's a fly* or *there's a small, dark,
moving object* (see 
 section 3.2). 



Of course, whether these ways of resolving the indeterminacies are
ultimately successful or whether they give rise to further, more
serious problems is a matter of debate. Some theorists who are
skeptical of the prospects of Neander's and Millikan's
solutions have thus proposed alternative answers to the problems of
content indeterminacy, especially to the more serious problem of
properties mutually implicated in selection.



Nicholas Agar (1993), for instance, supports the idea that the
frog's representation means *there's small, dark,
moving frog food*, a content intended to incorporate all of the
properties causally responsible for the selection. By contrast, Manolo
Martinez (2013) argues that it is not these properties
themselves that enter into the content of the frog's
representation, but the natural kind (understood as a
'homeostatic property cluster') that accounts for the
frequent co-instantiation of these properties. According to this
proposal, the content of the frog's representation would be
something like *there's a fly*. (This content ascription
is also favored by Artiga 2019, who synthesizes Martinez'
approach with Millikan's biosemantics, and extends it to
representations that do not refer to natural kinds.)



Finally, some proponents of teleological theories do not think that
content is determinate in the cases used to illustrate the alleged
problem. Dennett (1995) maintains that such content indeterminacy is
unproblematic. Papineau (1998) maintains that content is indeterminate
in the case of a creature that lacks a belief-desire psychological
structure (although he abandons this position later in Papineau 2016).
More recently, Bergman (2021) has argued that content indeterminacy in
the frog case is acceptable, because (i) it is a type of indeterminacy
that is comparatively 'well-behaved', more like vagueness
than like other, more radical forms of semantic indeterminacy and (ii)
there are good reasons to suppose that the indeterminacy does not
generalize to the propositional attitudes of human beings. According
to Bergman, this is an attractive position, not least because it can
explain why theorists continue to disagree about what the correct
content ascription in the frog case is.


### 4.2 Swampman



Another objection that has been influential is the Swampman objection.
Swampman-style examples have been around for some time (Boorse 1976;
Millikan 1984, 93). Swampman in particular was introduced by Davidson
(1987) as a potential objection to his own historical (but not
teleological) theory of content. When Swampman comes into existence he
is a perfect physical replica of Davidson at a certain point in time
(*t*).



Swampman's history differs radically from Davidson's
because he comes into existence as a result of a purely accidental
collision of elementary particles. Crucially, he does not partake in
our evolutionary history or have any other evolutionary history or any
developmental history of his own. Nor is he created by God or copied
from Davidson by a machine. The resemblance between Davidson and
Swampman is nothing but a stupendous coincidence. Swampman's
appearance of design is deceptive because he in no way derives from
any design process, natural or intentional. Swampman's component
parts have no functions according to an etiological theory of function
and so his "brain" states have no contents according to
standard teleological theories of mental content.



Many people find these results highly counter-intuitive, especially
the result that Swampman lacks all intentional states. Assuming
physicalism, we could substitute Swampman for Davidson and no one,
including his most intimate friends and family, would detect a
difference. Swampman would make noises that his friends and family
would interpret as witty, interesting and meaningful but, according to
standard teleological theories (and Davidson's own theory of
content) Swampman has no ideas about philosophy, no perceptions of his
surroundings and no beliefs or desires about anything at all.



We have already seen that some proponents of teleosemantics avoid this
problem entirely by adopting a non-historical conception of function
 (section 3.5). 
 For those theorists who do not want to take this route,
there are two broad strategies in responding to the Swampman
objection. One is to try to loosen the grip of the intuition that
Swampman has intentional states and the other is to argue that any
intuitions that remain do not show that teleological theories are
wrong. In either case, it is important to isolate the relevant
intuition because, by all accounts, Swampman would have much that
Davidson had at *t*. All of the chemical activity in
Davidson's brain when he understood words, for example, would
occur in Swampman's brain-analog and certain descriptions of
this activity will apply to both equally: e.g., physical, chemical and
formal descriptions of it. Further, it is trivial that Swampman has
narrow content if "narrow content" is defined as whatever
most closely approximates content that nonetheless supervenes on just
the narrow physical states of an individual at a time and "from
the skin in." By definition, whatever narrow content
Davidson's mental states had at *t*, Swampman's
inner states had too, since Swampman is at *t* physically
indistinguishable "from the skin in" from Davidson at
*t*. What teleological theories entail is that Swampman, no
matter what narrow content he has, lacks regular normative content.
The intuition that conflicts with teleological theories, therefore, is
that Swampman's inner states, which are narrowly identical to
Davidson's, are true, false, accurate or inaccurate in the usual
sense.



Those who try to dislodge this intuition argue that an appearance of
design can be misleading. (Recall that "design" here
includes the mechanical design-work of natural selection.) Consider,
for example,Swampman's eyes, or eye-analogs. It might be
intuitive to attribute functions to them. But in nature nothing so
intricately organized as if for the performance of a function fails to
be the result of a design process. It is argued that habits of
thought, which usually take us from an appearance of design to a
function ascription, lead to false ascriptions in purely hypothetical
unrealistic cases (Neander 1991). The same habits of thought, the
argument continues, also lead us to falsely ascribe intentionality to
Swampman's internal states. 



We might grant the point about functions and yet resist the move from
functions to intentionality. The problem for theories of content, as
opposed to theories of function, is exacerbated by the relation
between intentionality and consciousness. Many philosophers find it
plausible that an individual's phenomenal consciousness at a
time supervenes on just the inner physical properties of that
individual at that time. If this narrow supervenience thesis is true,
then Swampman will have phenomenal consciousness when he comes into
existence, assuming Davidson did at *t*. However, it is hard to
see how we can attribute phenomenal consciousness to Swampman without
also attributing some intentional states to him. Suppose, for example,
that Swampman has a red-sensation. Then presumably it will seem to him
that there is something red. But it seeming to him that there is
something red is presumably an intentional state. (See the
entry on 
 the contents of perception.)



Here we connect with another important issue that lies outside of the
scope of this entry. However, it should be briefly noted that
proponents of teleosemantics have several options for dealing with
this problem. They can either deny the narrow supervenience thesis for
phenomenal consciousness (see, e.g., Dretske 1995) or they can argue
that there is no necessary connection between phenomenal consciousness
and intentionality, i.e. that a being can be phenomenally conscious
without having genuine intentional states (see, e.g., Neander 1996 and
Papineau 2021).



The second broad strategy is to argue that Swampman intuitions cannot
show that teleological theories are false because they are irrelevant.
They are, it can be argued, not to the point if a teleological theory
is offered as an a posteriori, real-nature theory. This strategy comes
in two versions, which should be clearly distinguished.



Proponents of the first version of this strategy, e.g. Millikan (1996)
and Neander (1996), insist that common Swampman intuitions are
irrelevant because they are *incorrect*. They argue that it may
be natural to think that a possible being like Swampman would have
intentional states, but that this intuitive verdict is in fact false.
The analogy with an a posteriori analysis of the nature of water is
thought to be helpful here. Following Kripke and Putnam, many have
been persuaded that the term "water" and the concept WATER
have referred to H2O exclusively, even before it was known
that water is H2O, because there was deference to an
unknown nature that explained the superficial properties by means of
which we usually recognize instances of the liquid. On this view, it
was (in 1700) natural to think that there could be water without
H2O, although this was not, in fact, metaphysically
possible, given that water is H2O. Along similar lines, it
can be argued that a Swampman that has intentional states is only an
apparent, but not a genuine metaphysical possibility, and that common
Swampman intuitions thus do not undermine standard teleosemantic
theories of content. (Note that the claim here is not that Swampman is
metaphysically impossible, but only that a Swampman *with
intentional states* is.) 



Of course, in the case of intentionality, unlike the case of water,
the hidden nature or essence cannot be an inner structure, if a
teleological theory is correct. On such a theory, intentionality is
alleged to be an historical kind, so the previously hidden nature is
alleged to be a matter of history. As proponents of teleological
theories point out, there is an apparent need for other historical
kinds in biology (e.g., offspring, homologs and 
 species).[21]




According to the second version of the 'real nature'
strategy, defended by Papineau (2001; 2016), the common intuitive
verdict that Swampman would have intentional states may well be true,
but its truth would be irrelevant, because it does not conflict with
the core claims of teleosemantics (correctly understood). The idea
here is that Swampman's existence is a mere possibility, while
teleosemantics is a claim about the actual world - very roughly,
the claim that *in the actual world*, intentional states are
selectional states of a certain kind (Papineau 2001, 283-284). Hence,
the mere possibility of a Swampman whose intentional states are not
selectional states is perfectly compatible with the truth of
teleosemantics.



There has been much discussion of this second strategy in recent
years. Some critics argue that it is undermined by actual
Swampman-like cases (Peters 2014, Porter 2020), or by the epistemic
possibility of such cases (Sebastian 2017). Braddon-Mitchell
and Jackson (2002) have tried to show that such a version of
teleosemantics collapses into a form of analytical functionalism.
Furthermore, Schulte (2020, 2286-2288) contends that acknowledging
even the mere possibility of a Swampman with intentional states is
incompatible with the reductive aspirations of teleosemantics. Such
considerations may lead us to reject the teleosemantic approach (at
least in its standard, etiological form), but they can also be taken
as reasons to adopt the first version of the 'real nature'
strategy instead of the second.


### 4.3 Liberalism



Complete teleosemantic theories not only say how the content of a
state *R* is determined, given that *R* is a representation (thereby
answering the content-determination question), they also say what it
takes for *R* to qualify as a representation in the first place (thereby
answering the representational status question). Hence, such theories
entail claims about which systems count as possessing representational
states, and which do not. Accordingly, they can be criticized as
being *too restrictive* or *too liberal* (or as too
restrictive in certain respects and too liberal in others). The
Swampman objection, for example, aims to show that standard
teleosemantic theories are too restrictive in one respect, since they
entail that Swampman does not qualify as a representational system,
even though he should.



Other theorists have criticized standard teleosemantics as being too
liberal. A very influential objection along these lines has been
raised by Tyler Burge (2010, 303-307, 315-319; 2014; see also Rescorla
2013). Burge starts from the assumption that a theory of
representation should attribute representational states to a system
only if such attributions have genuine explanatory value (due to the
fact that they can figure in distinctively psychological
explanations). He then argues that teleosemantic theories, as well as
all other naturalistic ("deflationary") theories,
attribute representational states to very simple organisms, e.g. to
plants, protists and bacteria, where it is clear that such
attributions have no explanatory value. This leads him to conclude
that teleosemantic theories invariably attribute representational
states "too broadly" - or, in other words, that
teleosemantic theories are too 
 liberal.[22]




Now, Burge is certainly right in claiming that many prominent
teleosemantic theories are very liberal in attributing
representational states. Millikan's biosemantics, for instance,
arguably entails that all living beings are representational systems.
Shea's theory is not quite as liberal, but it still seems to
imply that many plants, protists and bacteria qualify as having
representations (see 
 section 3.5). 
 Hence, it is no surprise that many
proponents of teleosemantics seek to defend representational
liberalism against Burge's criticism. Artiga (2016), for
instance, who endorses a radical liberalism along Millikanian lines,
aims to show that Burge's case against the explanatory value of
representational characterizations of simple organisms begs the
question against teleosemantics (for discussion, cf. Schulte 2019a),
and he also gives a positive argument for the value of such
characterizations in his 
 (2021).[23]
 In a similar vein, Shea (2018) argues at length that his (moderately)
liberal theory allows us to make sense of the explanatory role of
content attributions in cognitive science. 



Other theorists have challenged Burge's assumption that they are
committed to some form of representational liberalism. Schulte (2015)
starts from Burge's (2010) positive thesis that it is the
possession of sensory systems with constancy mechanisms (e.g. size
constancy, color constancy, shape constancy or motion constancy) that
marks the distinction between representational and
non-representational organisms. If that is right, Schulte argues, then
there is a natural way for proponents of teleosemantics to incorporate
that insight into their account: they can require producers of sensory
representations to be systems with constancy mechanisms (where this is
spelled out in a naturalistic 
 way)[24] 
 and maintain that non-sensory representations presuppose the
existence of sensory 
 ones.[25]
 By Burge's own standards, such a theory would *not* be
too liberal. An alternative non-liberal version of teleosemantics has
been proposed by Butlin (2020a): he argues that sensory
representations need not satisfy Schulte's constancy-mechanism
requirement as long as they have an 'active consumer',
i.e. a consumer system where distinct processes are responsible for
generating behavior and for coordinating behavior with environmental
conditions.


### 4.4 Sophisticated Concepts and Capacities



The weightiest objection to teleological theories of content and the
hardest to assess is that it is unclear how such theories could
explain our most sophisticated concepts and cognitive 
 capacities.[26]




No naturalistic theory of content at this time yet makes perfectly
clear how we think about democracy, virtue, quarks or even
carburetors, and so this is not a problem that is peculiar to
teleofunctional theories. However, it is sometimes argued that
teleological theories of content have a special problem in this
respect (e.g., by Peacocke 1992). The thought is that they may have
some hope of working for contents that concern things that impact on
fitness - *food*, *shelter*, *mates*, etc.
- but that they are, in principle, unable to deal with contents
that cannot have impacted on fitness, or not in any suitably selective
way. Some contents cannot have impacted on fitness because they belong
to the future or are non-existent. Others cannot affect fitness in any
suitably selective way because, although they have an impact, their
impact is too non-specific: for example, quarks have an impact but
because they are omnipresent in our environment they cannot qualify as
the content of a representation by virtue of some simple selectional
story.



This objection is hard to assess for a number of reasons. One is that
there are many different kinds of sophisticated concepts and
capacities and accounting for them all is a large task. Another is
that, while the objection is posed as an objection to all
teleosemantic theories, different versions will address it in
different ways. Yet another is that we might allow that it is still
early days with respect to the development of teleological (and other)
naturalistic theories of mental content. It has really only been since
the advent of cognitive science in the middle of the last century and
the general acceptance of a broadly physicalist perspective on the
mind in the decades that followed that philosophers of mind have
devoted much effort to trying to give a naturalistic theory of mental
content.



In view of all of this, the present section can do little more than
offer a few remarks about how some versions of teleosemantics make
some inroads on the issue. Most of the points that follow have been
touched on in earlier sections.



It should be emphasized that those who favor teleosemantic theories
rarely restrict the relevant functions to those that derive from
natural selection operating over an evolutionary span of time. As
remarked earlier, there might be non-intentional selection processes
that operate over the span of a culture or over the span of an
individual's own development or life. Meme selection,
conditioning or some other forms of learning and neural selection are
considered to be relevant kinds of selection by some proponents of
teleosemantics.



Millikan would in this context ask us to take note of her notions of
derived and adapted proper functions (Millikan 1984, ch. 2). What
Millikan refers to as a "direct proper function" belongs
to a mechanism for which there has been selection. The mechanisms that
produce camouflage patterns on the surface of the octopus have the
direct proper function to do so. The patterns that these mechanisms
produce by means of which they perform this function possess what
Millikan calls a "derived proper function," derived from
the function of the mechanism to provide camouflage. Further, a
pattern produced on a particular occasion has an "adapted
derived proper function," which is a relational function, in
this case to provide camouflage in that particular setting in which
the octopus is situated. Millikan makes use of these extended senses
in which items may have functions to try to explain the contents of
novel representations and representations that are produced as a
result of learning. Learning mechanisms have certain functions and
when they perform their functions in particular circumstances their
products can have adapted derived proper functions in relation to
those circumstances, whether or not the circumstances obtained during
the history of our species.



Millikan (2000) gives an extensive treatment of 
 concepts.[27]
 In brief, her view is that conceptions play no role in
determining the extensions of the concepts with which they are
associated. Millikan's theory presupposes innate learning
mechanisms that are tuned to identify substances of different sorts in
accord with certain principles. The relevant sort of substance is that
which accounts for the past selective success of the learning
mechanisms. For instance, some mental mechanisms might have been
selected for recognizing faces of individuals in accord with certain
principles of operation, and others might have been selected for
recognizing animals of different species in accord with other
principles of operation. These mechanisms can acquire the
"purpose" to recognize something more specific, such as a
particular individual's face or animals of a particular species:
this is because the mechanisms were selected for recognizing things in
that domain (faces or animals) in accord with certain principles of
operation and, in accord with those principles, they now have the have
the "purpose" to recognize a particular individual's
face or animals of a particular species. The extension of a substance
concept, Millikan tells us, is what substance it was selected to
recognize.



Large issues relevant to assessing the different teleological theories
of content remain to be settled. On a hopeful note, much good work has
been done in exploring the possible range of such theories, in
producing interesting in-principle objections and in responding to
such objections in ways that have resulted in better developed or
better defended versions. We should also keep in mind that serious
work on naturalistic theories of content has only been going on for
decades rather than centuries and that, on a philosophical timescale,
that is quite a short time.