This thesis explores the intentional content of homeostatic drives (HDs), a group of mental states that include, among others, pain, itch, hunger, thirst, nausea, breathlessness, fatigue, and temperature sensations. HDs, I argue, constitute a philosophically interesting cluster of bodily experiences united by common phenomenology and function; yet with the exception of pain, they have rarely been the subject of philosophical analysis and have not been seriously investigated as a group. I seek to rectify this by expanding the ongoing debate on the representational content of pain. My goal is to determine whether this debate has already yielded an explanation for the entire class of HDs — and, if not, to identify the direction in which the inquiry should proceed. To this end, I consider, in turn, whether the attribution of purely indicative or purely imperative content to HDs might account for the key features of these mental states. I show that although each theory gets something right, neither pure indicativism nor pure imperativism fully explains HDs. I then show that the most obvious solution, which is to treat HDs as pushmi-pullyu mental states whose content is at once indicative and imperative, is equally inadequate, since it inherits the problems of the pure theories but does not combine their strengths. Ultimately, I suggest that the pure theories and the pushmi-pullyu theory fail for the same reason: they assume that HDs are simple mental states with a single layer of intentional content. I recommend an impure and complex approach to HDs and offer a sketch of a model that satisfies these desiderata.
