Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures

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; and, 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 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. After discussing Purposes and Cross-Purposes, Millikan describes a previously unrecognized kind of natural sign, locally recurrent natural signs, and several varieties of intentional signs. She discusses the ways in which representations themselves are represented and offers a novel interpretation of the way language is understood and of the relation between semantics and pragmatics. Finally, she discusses perception and thought, exploring stages in the development of inner representations.