Teleosemantics, also known as biosemantics, is used to refer to the class of theories of mental content that use a teleological notion of function. Teleosemantics is best understood as a general strategy for underwriting the normative nature of content, rather than any particular theory. What all teleological theories have in common is the idea that semantic norms are ultimately derivable from functional norms. Attempts to naturalize semantics began in the late 1970s. Many attempts were and still are being made to bring natural-physical explanations to bear on minds and, specifically, to the question of how minds acquire content. This is an interesting question; it is no surprise that it takes center stage in the
philosophy of mind. Indeed, it is certainly an interesting question how minds, thought by those in the natural camp to be "natural physical objects", There is a representational function as a whole, at a composite level; and there are two "sub-functions", the producer-function and the consumer-function. In terms that are easy to understand, let's take Millikan's own example of beavers splashing their tails. One beaver alerts other beavers to the presence of danger by splashing its tail on the surface of water. The splashing of the tail tells, or represents to, the other beavers that there is danger in the environment, and the other beavers dip into the water to avoid the danger. The splashing of the beaver's tail produces a representation; the other beavers consume the representation. The representation that the beavers consume guides their behavior in ways that relate to their survival. Of course, the foci of the teleosemantic program is internal representations, and not just representational states of affairs between two (or more) distinct, external entities. How does the picture of the producer and consumer beavers, for instance, play into a story about internal representations? Papineau and Macdonald describe Millikan's account of this well and loyally, saying "The producing mechanisms will be the sensory and other cerebral mechanisms that give rise to cognitive representations." The consuming mechanisms are those that "use these representations to direct behavior in pursuit of some biological end". Here, we have a picture similar to the beaver example, but this picture portrays the two sub-functions, producer and consumer, operating within a more-obviously unified system, namely, the cognitive system. One sub-function produces mental representations while the other sub-function consumes them in order to reach some end, e.g., danger-avoidance or food-acquisition. The representations consumed by the consumer sub-function guide an organism's behavior toward some biological end, e.g., survival. This is a rather brief sketch of Millikan's overall portrait. Of course, more goes into her account of the relation between producer- and consumer-functions in order to arrive at a nuanced account of mental representation. But that is a matter of how. Details as to the how aside, much of Millikan's efforts are directed towards the why, viz., why it is that perceivers like us have mental representations—why representations are produced in the first place. The theory of asymmetric dependence, from Fodor, who says that his theory "distinguishes merely informational relations on the basis of their higher-order relations to each other: informational relations depend upon representational relations, but not vice versa. He gives an example of this theory when he says, "if tokens of a mental state type are reliably caused by horses, cows-on-dark-nights, zebras-in-the-mist and Great Danes, then they carry information about horses, etc. If however, such tokens are caused by cows-on-dark-nights, etc. because they are caused by horses, but not vice versa, then they represent horses (or property horse). ==Alternative theories==