 Developing the strategy of §3.3C above, Externalist theories of meaning (or “content”) try to meet at least part of Quine’s challenge by considering how matters of meaning need not rely on epistemic. or really any internal connections among thoughts or beliefs, in the way that many philosophers had traditionally supposed, but as involving largely causal and social relations between uses of words and the phenomena in the world that they pick out. This suggestion gradually emerged in the work of Putnam (1962 [1975], 1965 [1975] and 1975), Kripke (1972 [1980]) and Burge (1979, 1986), but it took the form of positive theories in, e.g., the work of Devitt (1981, 2015), Dretske (1988) and Fodor (1990b), who tried to base meaning in various actual or co-variational causal relations between states of the mind/brain and external phenomena (see Indicator Semantics; as well as the work on “teleosemantics” of Millikan, 1984), Papineau, 1987, and Neander, 1995, 2017, who look to mechanisms of natural selection; see Teleological Theories of Mental Content).