Comments on Ruth Garrett Millikan’s Varieties of Meaning

Abstract

Wittgenstein notoriously contemplated using Kent's line in King Lear, I'll teach you differences! as a motto for his Philosophical Investigations. In the original, as Wittgenstein surely knew, Kent's declaration is, in fact, a threat, delivered to Goneril's insolent servant Oswald and followed up by a swift kick. In the same spirit, I think, Millikan might well have selected as a motto for her Nicod Lectures, Varieties of Meaning, I'll teach you likenesses! That, in any case, is how the book begins, with the dramatic thesis that