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Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.
List of contents
- Part I
- 0: Introduction to Part I
- 1: A Clumpy World
- 2: Direct Reference for Extensional Terms
- 3: Introducing Unitrackers and Unicepts
- 4: Functions of Same-Tracking
- 5: How Unicepts Get Their Referents
- 6: Misrepresentation, Redundancy, Equivocity, Emptiness (and Swampman)
- 7: Some Implications
- Part II
- 8: Introduction to Part II
- 9: Indexicals and Self-Signs
- 10: An Anatomy of Signs
- 11: Infosigns and Natural Information
- 12: Intentional Signs
- 13: Linguistic Signs
- 14: Perception, Especially Perception through Language
- 15: Markers of Identity and Grounded Infosigns
- 16: Out-side Pragmatics: Descriptions, Quantifiers, Directives
- Glossary
About the author
Ruth Garrett Millikan is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut. She was raised in the college town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and educated at Oberlin College and Yale University. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Winner of the 2017 Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy. She is also the winner of the 2017 Rolf Shock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. Her other books are Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984), White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (1993), On Clear and Confused Ideas (2000), Varieties of Meaning (2004), and Language: A Biological Model (2005).
Summary
Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.
Additional text
Brilliant.
