Reasons explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires and beliefs typically perform two major jobs. First, they display one way in which the action was appropriate or made sense. Second, they provide an explanation of why the action occured. The content of the cited beliefs and desires what is believed and desired clearly is crucial to the first job. It is because I want to drink water and believe there is water in the cup that my picking up the cup makes sense. If my relevant desires and beliefs had different contents if, for example, I believed instead that the cup was empty my picking up the cup might make no sense at all. But it is one thing for my action to be appropriate, given what I believe and desire; another for these beliefs and desires to explain why I so act. To be part of this explanation it seems that my desire and belief must at least be causes of my action. But this is not enough; for my desire and belief might cause my picking up the cup in a way that does not depend on their content. It might be that these states would have caused the same behavior even if they had had radically different contents, just as (in Dretske's example) the soprano's acoustic output would have caused the glass to break even if its conventional meaning had been radically different. The fact that my desires and beliefs have the content that they do the content that is critical to the first job of reasons explanations should itself contribute to a causal explanation of the action. Or so, at least, Fred Dretske supposes in his fascinating and important book, Explaining Behavior. How could the content of a mental state be part of a causal explanation of what the agent does? Well, it might work this way. What I believe and desire is fully determined by properties that are intrinsic to me, properties that do not depend on my relations to things outside of me. And my having these properties might be related in lawlike ways to what I do. This assumes that the content of my beliefs and desires is determined by my intrinsic properties. But this seems to many including Dretske to be false. On Dretske's view what I believe and desire is an extrinsic prop-