 A variant of psychologism takes an externalist approach to mental states. Externalism is the view that mental states ontologically depend on facts about the external world. It holds that, for instance, the content of a person’s concept of water partly depends on the actual structure of samples of water in the person’s environment; and likewise that the content of a person’s concept of the U.S. Government partly depends on the external entity that is the U.S. Government (see the entry on  externalism about mental content).