Abstract

In Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, Millikan adopts a naturalistic standpoint over meaning that she uses against what I call the logical place approach to semantics, i.e., any semantic frame that identifies the meaning of a sentence with a possible state of affairs or situation and that takes this sort of entity as determined by the meaning of its non logical constituents and by its sintagmatic structure. Millikan´s own view on meaning is based on a theory of proper functions that accords linguistic expressions a biological function. My goal in this paper is twofold. Firstly, I try to show that Millikan´s own way of founding semantics on biology does not make plain justice to a number of empirical semantic problems and ignores that the logical place approach to semantics deals with them in much more satisfactory way. And secondly, I argue that the naturalistic ideology in the theory of meaning might be better served by a combination of the logical place approach to semantics with some of the ideas Millikan advocates