Millikan, Meaning, and Minimalism

Abstract

Abstract Across a series of seminal works, Ruth Millikan has produced a compelling and comprehensive naturalized account of content. With respect to linguistic meaning, her ground‐breaking approach has been to analyse the meaning of a linguistic term via the function it performs which has been responsible for securing the term's survival. This way of looking at things has significant repercussions for a number of recent debates in philosophy of language. This article explores these repercussions through the lens of what is known as semantic minimalism, using the tenets of minimalism to draw out some questions for Millikan's approach to the semantics/pragmatics divide.

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