 Forward looking causal theories (which look ahead to the items that our concepts cause us to apply terms to rather than back to the ones that first caused us to form the concept), such as those presented by writers working in what can roughly be called “Information Semantics” (Dretske 1981; Fodor 1987, 1990; Stampe 1979), also attempt to develop semantic theories that are typically atomistic. The type of use that such atomistic theories must take meaning to be determined by are typically single applications like “cat” or at best “That’s a cat”, since any more complex examples of use (such as sentences like “cats are mammals” or “cats like milk”) run the risk of tying the meaning of “cat” to our use of other words in the language (and thus to the factors that determine their meaning). However, underwriting a distinction between correct and incorrect use while appealing only to such simple assertions has proved to be extremely difficult, and there is no consensus even among the proponents of such atomistic approaches about what is the most promising way to tackle the problem (see the discussion of “the disjunction problem” in Adams &amp; Aizawa 2010). It has been tried in terms of optimal conditions (Papineau 1987), contexts where the term was learned (Dretske 1981) asymmetric causal dependence (Fodor 1990), but no such account has done a convincing job of preventing classifications that intuitively seem to be errors from being built into the purported extensions of our terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the checks on our dispositions that these atomistic theories need to get truth-conditions right must include the collateral commitments that speakers have in particular contexts, and that appealing to these will lead away from atomism (Boghossian 1989, 1990 (drawing on Kripke 1982); Jackman 2003b; Podlaskowski 2010). 