Thinking about the Content of Thoughts: Advance or Regression?

Abstract

In this paper I analyze recent neo-pragmatic views that have followed Wittgenstein’s anti-representationalist perspective on meaning. One can find a bifurcation in recent literature on the question of how human understanding and communication actually take place in society. Some are convinced that natural science can explain all our communicative capacities. Others still believe that there is something special about meaning. On both sides we find representation a lists and anti-representationalists. I present here the main features of this bifurcation so as to argue in favor of a neural-pragmatic semantic, that still has a Wittgensteinian flavor, but that incorporates lessons received from embodied cognition theories and frombiosemantics.