Many different things are said to have meaning: people mean to
do various things; tools and other artifacts are meant for various
things; people mean various things by using words and sentences;
natural signs mean things; representations in people's minds also
presumably mean things. In "Varieties of Meaning," Ruth Garrett
Millikan argues that these different kinds of meaning can be
understood only in relation to each other.
What does meaning in the sense of purpose (when something is
said to be meant for something) have to do with meaning in the
sense of representing or signifying? Millikan argues that the
explicit human purposes, explicit human intentions, are represented
purposes. They do not merely represent purposes; they possess the
purposes that they represent. She argues further that things that
signify, intentional signs such as sentences, are distinguished
from natural signs by having purpose essentially; therefore, unlike
natural signs, intentional signs can misrepresent or be false.
Part I discusses "Purposes and Cross-Purposes" -- what purposes
are, the purposes of people, of their behaviors, of their body
parts, of their artifacts, and of the signs they use. Part II then
describes a previously unrecognized kind of natural sign, "locally
recurrent" natural signs, and several varieties of intentional
signs, and discusses the ways in which representations themselves
are represented. Part III offers a novel interpretation of the way
language is understood and of the relation between semantics and
pragmatics. Part IV discusses perception and thought, exploring
stages in the development of inner representations, from the
simplest organisms whose behavior is governed by perception-action
cycles to the perceptions and intentional attitudes of humans.
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