Teleosemantics

Teleosemantics is the thesis that meaning is a natural kind, of the same order as digestion or immunity, and can be explained without appeal to any inner light. Developed by Ruth Millikan beginning in 1984, it holds that a sign has content—is about something—because it has a proper function, and a proper function is always a product of history: what a lineage of items did that explains why copies of them continued to be made. Applied to mental and linguistic representations, the theory says that the meaning of a thought or a word is the condition that must obtain in the world for the sign to perform its proper function in the normal way. Error is possible—and clearly defined—as functional failure. The framework is the dominant tradition in naturalistic philosophy of mind and the sharpest available tool for the question that large language models press on every thoughtful observer: when the model produces fluent text, do its tokens