 As was noted above, what unifies causal theories of mental content is some version of the idea that “X”s being causally connected to Xs makes “X”s mean Xs. What divides causal theories of mental content, most notably, is the different approaches they take to separating the content-determining causes from the non-content-determining causes. Some of these different theories appeal to normal conditions, others to functions generated by natural selection, others to functions acquired ontogenetically, and still others to dependencies among laws. At present there is no approach that is commonly agreed to correctly separate the content-determining causes from the non-content determining causes while at the same time respecting the need not to invoke existing semantic concepts. Although each attempt may have technical problems of its own, the recurring problem is that the attempts to separate content-determining from non-content-determining causes threaten to smuggle in semantic elements.