Language: A Biological Model

by Ruth Garrett Millikan

Overview

Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, comparing them to biological norms that emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of public linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how children learn language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199284771
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/20/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	8.16(w) x 5.92(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Ruth Millikan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut.

Table of Contents

1. Language Conventions Made Simple2. In Defense of Public Language3. Meaning, Meaning, and Meaning4. The Son and the Daughter: On Sellars, Brandom, and Millikan5. The Language-Thought Partnership6. Why (most) Kinds are not Classes7. Cutting Philosophy of Language Down to Size8. Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts9. Pushmi-pullyu Representations10. Semantics/Pragmatics (Purposes and Cross-Purposes)