  The worry is that we apparently operate, in important respects, as vending machines do. We respond to incoming stimuli solely in virtue of our intrinsic makeup and the intrinsic character of the stimuli. But if our thoughts possess their content in virtue of our standing in complicated environmental–social–historical relations to our surroundings, it is hard to see how such contents could make a causal difference in our psychological economy, how they could figure in the production of behavior. Thoughts have contents, but these contents could have no direct influence on the operation of mental mechanisms (Stich 1978; Kim 1982; Fodor 1980, 1987, ch. 2, 1991; Jackson and Pettit 1988).