The Putnamian and Quineian part of this paper: how can something "mean" something?, referring to The Meaning of Meaning and the Roots of Reference may be taken as a dedication to the great philosophical climate of Harvard, and it is also to remind us of Wittgenstein's sentence in his Blue Book (1958, p. 15): "For an understanding "of meaning' you certainly also have to understand the meaning of "explanation of meaning'." Wittgenstein, in another context, has argued that philosophy is going to try to cure the wounds language produces, when it tries to overcome its own borders; and it is especially due to this problem of intentionality, that cognitive science comes into trouble when its main focus is on philosophy of language. The method I am going to propose here represents an operationalizing and quantifying approach to semantic phenomena and is nonlinguistic. It may be regarded, therefore, as an interesting new paradigm bringing together functional neurobiology and philosophy of mind.