282 The Prospects for Teleosemantics: Can Biological Functions Fix Mental Content? Justine Kingsbury 20 Teleosemantic theories are naturalistic theories of mental content distinctive for their appeal to biological functions. Ruth Millikan’s Language, Tought 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 feld of naturalistic theories of content. NATURALIZING CONTENT What is it for a mental state to be about, say, the whiteness of snow, rather than the price of fsh or the raininess of the weather here and now? Tis is the question that theorists of content seek to answer. Tere are good reasons to want an answer to the question that is in some sense natu- ralistic. Naturalism goes along with seeing the philosophy of mind as an empirical rather than purely conceptual enterprise—an enterprise that is not diferent in kind from nat- ural science. Mental states cause behavior, and what they are about makes a diference to what behavior they cause; on the face of it, intentionality (or “aboutness”) is both real and causally efcacious. And as Jerry Fodor puts it: “if aboutness is real, it must really be something else.” I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue . . . of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear on the list. But aboutness surely won’t; 15034-0222d-1Pass-PIV-020-r01.indd 282 15034-0222d-1Pass-PIV-020-r01.indd 282 5/9/2017 4:53:28 PM 5/9/2017 4:53:28 PM