Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information
Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information
Distinguished Professor Emerita
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Abstract
This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.
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Front Matter
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Part I Unicepts
Ruth Garrett Millikan-
Introduction to Part I
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1
A Clumpy World
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2
Direct Reference for Extensional Terms
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3
Introducing Unitrackers and Unicepts
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4
Functions of Same-Tracking
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5
How Unicepts Get Their Referents
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6
Misrepresentation, Redundancy, Equivocity, Emptiness (and Swampman)
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7
Philosophical Analysis; Referents of Names: Theory Change; Observation versus Theory; Theory of Mind
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Introduction to Part I
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Part II Infosigns, Intentional Signs, and their Interpretation
Ruth Garrett Millikan-
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Introduction to Part II
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9
Indexicals and Selfsigns
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10
An Anatomy of Signs
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11
Infosigns and Natural Information
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12
Intentional Signs
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13
Linguistic Signs
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14
Perception, Especially Perception through Language
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15
Markers of Identity and Grounded Infosigns
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16
Out-Side Pragmatics: Descriptions, Quantifiers, Directives
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8
Introduction to Part II
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End Matter
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