Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism

Front Cover
MIT Press, Dec 16, 1987 - Psychology - 367 pages
Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, Ruth Millikan argues that the intentionality of language can be described without reference to speaker intentions and that an understanding of the intentionality of thought can and should be divorced from the problem of understanding consciousness. The results support a realist theory of truth and of universals, and open the way for a nonfoundationalist and nonholistic approach to epistemology.

A Bradford Book

 

Contents

Chapter
8
Chapter 1
17
Adapted Devices and Adapted and Derived Proper Functions
39
Chapter 4
56
Language Device Types Dictionary Senses Stabilizing Proper
71
Chapter 5
85
Chapter 7
115
Case Studies of Intensions Senses
127
Represented Referents and Protoreferents
193
Quotation Marks Says That and Believes That
207
Chapter 14
221
Chapter 15
239
Chapter 16
254
Chapter 17
277
Chapter 18
297
Concepts Laws and Intrusive
311

Chapter 9
143
PART III
158
Chapter 11
175

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About the author (1987)

Ruth Garrett Millikan is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (MIT Press, 1984) and White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (MIT Press, 1995) and On Clear and Confused Ideas.

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