PERSON
Ruth Millikan
The philosopher who gave meaning a biology—founder of teleosemantics, the most rigorous naturalistic account of what it takes for any sign, thought, or word to be about something in the world, and the sharpest available instrument for asking whether a machine’s tokens mean anything at all.
Ruth Millikan built the only theory of meaning rigorous enough to make the machine’s great evasion impossible. Most philosophy of mind had treated the aboutness of thought as a problem about consciousness, an inner light the mind shines on its contents. Millikan rejected that picture and replaced it with biology: a sign means what it does, she argued, because of its proper function—what it was selected to do across a lineage of reproductions in which the sign’s effect explains its survival. Her foundational book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (MIT Press, 1984), fused a naturalistic theory of function, a theory of meaning built on that foundation, and an application of both to language and knowledge, and it won her the Rolf Schock Prize, philosophy’s nearest equivalent to a Nobel. The framework she founded, teleosemantics, is now the dominant tradition in naturalistic philosophy of mind—and it is the most precise