Millikan’s Teleosemantics and Communicative Agency1 Introduction2 The Gricean mentalistic picture of communicative agency 2.1 The mindreading thesis 2.2 The separability thesis3 Millikan’s teleosemantic machinery3.1 Teleosemantics and informational semantics3.2 The etiological conception of functions3.3 The sender-receiver framework3.4 Conventional patterns4 Is verbal understanding an extended form of perception?4.1 Perceiving the world through language4.2 Ordinary and extended perception4.3 Tracking the domains of intentional conventional signs5 Conventions and belief-desire psychology5.1 Teleosemantics and the separability thesis5.2 Cooperation and social conformity5.3 Counterpart reproduction 6 Teleosemantics and the puzzles of early human social cognition 6.1 Millikan’s developmental puzzle6.2 The puzzle of imitative learning6.3 The puzzle about early false-belief understanding7 Conclusion