DescriptionThis dissertation is concerned with the metaphysical basis of the laws and vocabularies of non-fundamental sciences, and the relevance of these issues to the problem of intentionality. It comprises three stand-alone but mutually supporting papers. In the first two papers, ‘Crystallized Regularities’ (published in the Journal of Philosophy) and ‘Naturalness by Law’, I put forward reductive accounts of special science laws and natural properties. Together, these accounts reconcile foundationalism about physics (roughly, the idea that our world’s macro-structure is recoverable from micro-physics) with a certain kind of autonomy of the special sciences. Drawing on these accounts of special science laws and properties, the third paper (‘Informational Semantics Revisited’) develops a new account of mental representation, which improves on Fred Dretske’s (1981) informational account. In broad strokes, the idea is to think of interpretation functions as concise summaries of patterns of informational connections between elements in a representational system and environmental states of affairs. I argue that, given the right notion of ‘informational connection’ and some plausible theoretical constraints on good summaries, this view can explain how misrepresentation is possible and how enough content determinacy is achieved, thus providing a promising account of how representation fits into fundamental reality.