Language: A Biological Model
by Ruth Garrett Millikan /
2005 / English / PDF
4.9 MB Download
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.
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.