Notably spurred into the philosophical forefront by Thomas Nagel's 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' decades ago, and since maintained by a number of advocates of dualism since that critical publication, is the assertion that our inability to know 'what it's like' to be someone or something else is inexplicable given physicalism. Contrary to this well-known and central objection, I find that a consistent and exhaustive physicalism is readily conceivable. I develop one such theory and demonstrate that not (...) only is it consistent with the private and varied nature of subjective experience, it, in fact, entails it. (shrink)

It is argued that the theoretical and conceptual tangle in which linguistics finds itself at the turn of the century, is rooted in the methodological inadequacies of traditional (Cartesian) philosophy. A holistic approach, sustained by the accumulated empirical evidence and supported by the new epistemology of autopoiesis, is proposed, whereby language is viewed as adaptive functional activity based on an organism’s experience of the environment to which the organism stands in a relation of mutual causality.