 Stampe (1977) was one of the first philosophers in modern times to suggest a theory of content according to which content is a matter of reliable causes. Dretske’s book, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) has also been very influential. The theory Dretske develops in that book relies primarily on the notion of information, but he later offers a theory of content that combines both informational and teleological elements (Dretske 1986, 1988, 1995). He begins with a notion of information-carrying, which he calls “indicating”, and suggests that a representation’s content is what it has the function to   indicate.[6] 