What distinguishes a meaningless utterance from a meaningful term? While one might say that, within the context of Ruth Millikan\'s teleosemantics, it is a term\'s having a proper function that distinguishes it from a meaningless utterance, I propose that the distinction can be made with reference to the history of the term. Using evolutionary game theory, I offer a way to clarify the distinction between the meaningless and the meaningful. I reject the possibility of correlating meaning with an evolutionarily stable strategy as this does not seem to be consistent with how communication works or with Millikan\'s theory. Instead, when a term has meaning, the function category of that term corresponds to an evolutionarily stable state composed of both speaker and hearer strategies. / Master of Arts
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/20377 |
| Date | 03 May 2013 |
| Creators | Slipetz, Lindley |
| Contributors | Philosophy, Patton, Lydia K., Jantzen, Benjamin C., Pitt, Joseph C. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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