pt. 1. Purposes and cross-purposes. Purposes and cross-purposes of humans -- Purposes and cross-purposes of memes -- pt. 2. Natural signs and intentional signs. Local natural signs and information -- Productivity and embedding in natural signs -- Teleosemantic theories -- Intentionality -- Intensionality -- pt. 3. Outer intentional signs. Linguistic signs emerge from natural signs -- Direct perception through language -- Tracking the domains of conventional signs -- Varieties of the semantics-pragmatics distinction -- Demonstratives, indexicals, and a bit more about descriptions -- pt. 4. Inner intentional signs. Inner pushmi-pullyus -- Detaching representations of objects -- Space and time -- Detaching goal state representations -- Generating goal state representations -- Limitations on nonhuman thought -- Conjectures on human thought.
Summary
Many different things are said to have meaning: people mean to do various things; tools and other artifacts are meant for various things. This text argues that these different kinds of meaning can be understood only in relation to each other.
