 Three escapes from this potential difficulty suggest themselves. One is to endorse a version of “conceptual [or functional] role semantics” according to which the representational status and content of a mental state is reducible just to facts about what is apt to cause and to be caused by the mental state in question—that is, to deny the relevance of remote evolutionary or learning history to mental representation as not part of a proper functional characterization (e.g., Harman 1973, 1987). Another is to accept that causal role determines the representational status of a mental state (i.e., that it is a representation) but does not fully specify representational content (i.e. how that representation represents things as being); but this seems to involve abandoning full-blown functionalism. A third is to interpret more liberally what it is for a mental state to be “typically caused” (or perhaps “normally caused”) by some event or state of affairs: Perhaps it is enough that in the young organism, or its evolutionary ancestors, mental states of that sort were caused in a particular way, or the system was selected to be responsive to certain sorts of environmental factors. Such claims may be more easily reconcilable with certain canonical statements of functionalism (such as Lewis 1980) than with others (such as Putnam 1975). The issue has not been as fully discussed as it should be.