 The preceding attempts to distinguish the content-determining causes from non-content-determining causes focused on the background or boundary conditions under which the distinct types of causes may be thought to act. Fodor’s Asymmetric Dependency Theory (ADT), however, represents a bold alternative to these approaches. Although Fodor (1987, 1990a, b, 1994) contain numerous variations on the details of the theory, the core idea is that the content-determining cause is in an important sense fundamental, where the non-content-determining causes are non-fundamental. The sense of being fundamental is that the non-content-determining causes depend on the content-determining cause; the non-content-determining causes would not exist if not for the content-determining cause. Put a bit more technically, there are numerous laws such as ‘Y1 causes “X”,’ ‘Y2 causes “X”,’ etc., but none of these laws would exist were it not a law that X causes “X”. The fact that the ‘X causes “X”’ law does not in the same way depend on any of the Y1, Y2, …, Yn laws makes the dependence asymmetric. Hence, there is an asymmetric dependency between the laws. The intuition here is that the question, ‘What kind of animal is called “Fido”?’ will cause an occurrence of the representation “X” only because of the fact that dogs cause “X”. Instances of foxes cause instances of “X” only because foxes are mistaken for dogs and dogs cause instances of “X”.