 On Fodor’s view, the first use is in the sense of information-carrying only. Smoke carries the information that there is fire, but that is not what it means semantically. What ‘smoke’ means, in the semantic sense, is smoke, and this is captured by the latter use of “means” above. On Fodor’s story, just as with ‘cat’ above, ‘smoke’ means smoke because it expresses smoke, and tokenings of smoke are caused paradigmatically (but not always!) by smoke itself. The “not always” qualification is covered by the asymmetric dependence condition above. So far so good, but what about non-existent objects such as bunyips? Non bunyip-caused bunyip tokens of bunyip cannot be asymmetrically dependent on bunyip-caused bunyip tokens of bunyip because there are no bunyips around to cause anything at all.