ABSTRACT
Teleosemantic theories are naturalistic theories of mental content distinctive for their appeal to biological functions. Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984) and David Papineau’s Reality and Representation (1987) presented teleosemantic theories that were the subject of much critical discussion in the 1980s and 1990s. Less attention has been paid to teleosemantics since, not because it has been shown to face insurmountable obstacles, or because some competing naturalistic theory of content has triumphed, but rather because naturalizing content is no longer center stage in the philosophy of mind. 1 However, teleosemantics remains one of the leading contenders in the field of naturalistic theories of content.
