Dretske's and Fodor's work on causal-explanatory relevance of mental content shows that propositional attitudes can be causally efficacious in virtue of their semantic properties, not despite them.
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Semantic properties(as used in philosophy of language)
The meaningful aspects of something—like what a word means or what a musical note represents, as opposed to just its physical sound.
mental content(Davidsonian account)
The content of propositional mental states such as belief, determined through causal relations between speakers and objects in the world and through the rational integration of speakers' behaviour.
propositional attitudes(Fodor's 1980 reply to Searle)
Mental states characteristic of an organism that has a brain, such as beliefs and desires, which computational symbol manipulation alone is insufficient to produce.