Hamed Bastin

The ontological transition from biological signaling to the complexities of human natural language has traditionally been conceptualized as a saltational leap, a categorical rupture where mechanical causality terminates and "rational" intentionality emerges. This paper posits the Teleofunctional Evolutionary Representation Model (TERM) as a robust framework to bridge this theoretical lacuna. By synthesizing Ruth Millikan's biosemantics with a novel structural-functional taxonomic unit termed the "Functure," this study argues for a formal, teleological continuity extending from primordial genetic sequences (R0) to the sophisticated structures of formal logic (R3). The analysis provides a rigorous critique of the rationalist tradition, which erroneously treats representation as an exclusively mental phenomenon. Instead, it is proposed that intentionality constitutes a natural property derived from the evolutionary efficacy of producer-consumer systems. The model culminates in a redefinition of logic: rather than a collection of transcendental Platonic laws, logic is understood as the stabilized regulation of representational transitions, selected to facilitate inter-agent social coordination. This exploration offers a naturalized account of semantics, displacing the "subjective mind" from the locus of meaning and repositioning it as an emergent product of teleofunctional history.

A central problem in Aristotle's modal logic is the apparent conflict between his views on necessity and his doctrine of assertoric syllogisms. Since Theophrastus and Eudemus, this tension has led most scholars to conclude that Aristotle's modal syllogistic is inconsistent. Drawing on Aristotle's own works and on early commentators, especially Alexander of Aphrodisias, this paper offers a new reading that stays as close as possible to Aristotle's own views. It explains how necessity can pass from a single necessary premise to the conclusion, and sets out the reasoning, grounded in Aristotle's account of substance in the Categories and the Metaphysics, that makes this possible.

Scott Soames divides two-dimensionalism into weak and strong versions and argues that both fail to revive a descriptive theory of meaning. On this issue, Millikan's biosemantics can strengthen the two-dimensionalist position. Soames holds that two-dimensionalists must rigidify reference-fixing descriptions; this paper argues that the requirement does not hold, because those descriptions are already rigid in another way. It shows, first, that Soames's reading of two-dimensionalism depends heavily on the principles of direct reference theory. Second, it uses a three-dimensional model based on biosemantics and on the role of intuition to show that two-dimensional semantics need not rigidify reference-fixing descriptions in the way Soames claims.

In analytic philosophy, Millikan's biosemantics is often read only as a reply to Putnam's problem of referential indeterminacy. The complexity of her views and the difficulty of her exposition have kept the theory little known, especially among Iranian philosophers and logicians. Biosemantics rests on natural selection, and Millikan's examples about meaning, mind and language often require a biological background to follow. Although the theory has mostly been read as a theory of mind and mental content, it is, as its name says, a theory of meaning. After a brief presentation of biosemantics and of its opposition to meaning rationalism, this paper offers a new model showing that biosemantics is a theory of meaning through and through, with the potential to transform basic semantic concepts.

Responding to Putnam's problem of the referential indeterminacy of terms, Millikan asks whether the problem would survive a new definition of representation grounded in biology, and in particular in natural selection. Her answer is no. The right question, she holds, is what makes one relation, among the countless possible relations between words and things, the relation between a representation and what it represents. Her answer depends on a historical view of function, still disputed in biology: an item's proper function is what it was selected to do, not what it currently does in its present setting. This paper argues that Millikan's definition of representation rests on the concept of the functure, and that representation so understood is fully objective, contrary to the prevailing view that it is a mental phenomenon.