1 Final Draft. Please cite the published version: Philosophia 40, 2012, pp. 483-496. How Frogs See the World: Putting Millikan’s Teleosemantics to the Test PETER SCHULTE Abstract How do frogs represent their prey? This question has been the focus of many debates among proponents of naturalistic theories of content, especially among proponents of teleosemantics. This is because alternative versions of the teleosemantic approach have different implications for the content of frog representations, and it is still controversial which of these content ascriptions (if any) is the most adequate. Theorists often appeal to intuitions here, but this is a dubious strategy. In this paper, I suggest an alternative, empirical test for theories of content. I propose that we should examine whether a theory generates content ascriptions that fit with our best scientific explanations of animal behavior. I then focus on the most prominent version of teleosemantics, Ruth Millikan’s consumer-oriented approach, and argue that it fails the empirical test in the frog case, since it yields a content ascription that (i) does not include properties that should be included (namely, being small, dark and moving) and (ii) includes a property that should not be included (namely, being frog food). This is an important result in itself, but it also demonstrates by way of example how progress can be made in the complex debate about theories of content. Introduction What does a frog think when it sees a fly? Or, if ‘thinking’ is not the right word here, how does the frog represent the fly? Questions like these, which concern the intentional content of animal representations, are central to the philosophy of animal minds. Of course, some philosophers have disputed that such questions are sensible. They hold that we cannot ascribe contentful states to nonlinguistic animals because language is, for some reason or other, necessary for genuine intentionality. Other theorists are more optimistic in this respect.