 As the list of names of the previous paragraph suggests, functionalism is compatible with either a representationalist approach to belief (as in Fodor) or an interpretationist one (as in Dennett). (The interpretationist, of course, will have to treat the relevant functional states as posits of an interpretative theory or scheme.) Dispositional accounts of belief, too, can be functionalist. Indeed, dispositional accounts can be seen as a special or limiting case of functional accounts. To see this, it’s helpful to divide the causal relations appealed to by functionalism into the backward-looking and the forward-looking. Backward-looking causal relations pertain to what actually, potentially, or typically causes the state in question; forward-looking causal relations pertain to what effects the state in question actually, potentially, or typically has. Thus (1) and (2) above are backward-looking causal relations, while (3) and (4) are forward-looking. We might, then, see the dispositionalist as a functionalist who thinks only the forward-looking causal relations are definitive of belief: To believe is to be in a state apt to cause such-and-such behavioral (or other) manifestations. (This view is, of course, compatible with accepting the existence of regularities like (1) and (2), as long as they are not regarded as defining characteristics of belief.) Two caveats, however, should accompany this reduction of dispositionalism to functionalism: First, insofar as functionalism about belief requires a causal relationship between the belief state and its manifestations in behavior (or in other mental states), it will exclude dispositionalists like Ryle (1949) who don’t view the disposition-manifestation relationship causally (for discussion, see Section 6 (‘The causal efficacy of dispositions’) of the entry on  dispositions).  Second, the liberal dispositionalist may wish to demur from the functionalist’s usual commitment to the reducibility of facts about functionally-definable mental states, en masse and in principle (allowing for the intricate network of interrelationships among them), to facts about sensory inputs and outward behavior.