Are there grounded semantics in (model) organisms?

Abstract

When trying to convene a sense of meaning as a biological property, we should probably want to figure out how exactly we are supposed to cash out the notion of meaning that we have in mind in the first place. Though certainly not the same, meaning and semantics ought to be seen as related, and satisfying a definition for each is a desirable theoretical step forward in trying to understand whether and how meaning is connected with explanations in biology. On the one hand, a constrained definition of semantics is indicative of a linguistic intuition about meaning. On the other, this same notion can stifle a more proper understanding of meaning in simple and non-linguistic organisms. In this paper, I wish to propose a reduced view of content for handling meaning while retaining a guiding notion of semanticity that will influence how we look at experience in non-linguistic organisms. In order to achieve this, I will look at how biology conceptualizes model organisms and propose a philosophical model organism to make our abstract notions of meaning and meaning-making approachable.