Here the issue is not how to naturalize content (abstract objects can't be naturalized), but, rather, how to specify naturalistic content-determining relations between mental representations and the abstract objects they express.
The nature of our research objectives leads us to use a mixed methodology based on a naturalistic observation, content analysis and comparative statistics.
We should also keep in mind that serious work on naturalistic theories of content has only been going on for decades rather than centuries and that, on a philosophical timescale, that is quite a short time.
No naturalistic theory of content at this time yet makes perfectly clear how we think about democracy, virtue, quarks or perhaps even tomorrow, and so this is not a problem that is peculiar to teleo-functional theories.
Many in philosophy (Dretske, Fodor, Millikan) worked on naturalistic theories of mental content.
Yet another is that we might allow that it is still early days with respect to the development of teleological (and other) naturalistic theories of mental content.
(It would also raise prima face problems for reductivist representationalism (see the next section), as well as for reductive naturalistic theories of intentional content).
To play a role in a naturalistic account of mental content, the relevant selection process must be non-intentional but it need not be natural selection operating over an evolutionary span of time.
It has really only been since the advent of cognitive science in the middle of the last century and the general acceptance of a broadly physicalist perspective on the mind in the decades that followed that philosophers of mind have devoted much effort to trying to give a naturalistic theory of mental content.
This is not representative of the unconstrained conditions, nor of the highly variable content, of naturalistic speech.
I argue that a naturalistic account of satisfaction conditions of contents answers the most important objections of antirepresentationalists.
