Ruth Millikan- University of Connecticut
Ruth Millikan
- University of Connecticut
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Publications (107)
There is a tendency to assimilate so called “consciousness studies” to studies of the phenomenology of experience, and it seems to me that this is a shame. It is a shame, I think, because there is no such thing as a legitimate phenomenology of experience whereas there certainly is such a thing as consciousness. So long as people assimilate studies...
Intentions and conventions can “make a thing be what it is” in two different ways. Taken separately, neither has any magic in it at all. Neither produces objects of a kind that is in any way remarkable or that requires any special mode of understanding. Only by running these two ways together in our minds do we imagine “socially constructed” or “so...
A description of natural signs and natural information is proposed that interprets the presence of natural information as an affordance for the particular animal or species that would interpret it. This solves the reference class problem that undercuts earlier correlational accounts. It explains how there can be natural signs of individuals and als...
Sainsbury and Tye (2011) propose that, in the case of names and other simple extensional terms, we should substitute for Frege's second level of content —for his senses—a second level of meaning vehicle—words in the language of thought. I agree. They also offer a theory of atomic concept reference—their 'originalist' theory—which implies that peopl...
Sainsbury and Tye (2011) propose that, in the case of names and other simple extensional terms, we should substitute for Frege's second level of content—for his senses—a second level of meaning vehicle—words in the language of thought. I agree. They also offer a theory of atomic concept reference—their ‘originalist’ theory—which implies that people...
This is a volume about animal communication. One important question concerns whether animals communicate information, and to answer we first need to know what information is. Information is carried by signs. This chapter proposes a theory of signs and of information. Root signs Root signs include all signs that provide information (a notion to be e...
I give an analysis of how empirical terms do their work in communication and the gathering of knowledge that is fully externalist
and that covers the full range of empirical terms. It rests on claims about ontology. A result is that armchair analysis fails
as a tool for examining meanings of ‘basic’ empirical terms because their meanings are not de...
Professor Elder has, I believe, misunderstood my position on the ontology of individuals, for I am not any kind of stage theorist. I do indeed believe, however, that there is a sense in which many different things can be in the same place at once, though it is not a sense in which thing is a count noun. To explain this, I briefly describe what I...
This interview deals with the major themes in the work of Ruth Millikan. Her most fundamental idea is that the intentionality of inner and outer representations can be understood in analogy to biological functions. Another innovative feature is the view that thought and language stand parallel to each other. Thirdly, the basic ideas concerning the...
I highlight and amplify three central points that McKay & Dennett (M&D) make about the origin of failures to perform biologically proper functions. I question whether even positive illusions meet criteria for evolved misbelief.
"Biosemantics" was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984). There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguis...
Lewis’s view of the way conventions are passed on may have some especially interesting consequences for the study of language.
I’ll start by briefly discussing agreements and disagreements that I have with Lewis’s general views on conventions and then
turn to how linguistic conventions spread. I’ll compare views of main stream generative linguistic...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
By whatever general principles and mechanisms animal behavior is governed, human behavior control rides piggyback on top of the same or very similar mechanisms. We have reflexes. We can be conditioned. The movements that make up our smaller actions are mostly caught up in perception-action cycles following perceived Gibsonian affordances. Still, wi...
Teleological theories of mental content explain how emptiness and falseness can occur in thought. These defects are due to failure of the representation-producing devices to do the jobs they were designed to do. Teleological theories always rest on prior theories of what the jobs of mental representations are and of what their producers are.
In the last century, hundreds of experiments were conducted by psychologists to try to discover how people classify or categorize items under kind (category) words such as dog, chair, and fruit. The position that the chapter takes about such words is that they do not designate classes but rather units of an entirely different kind. The chapter intr...
The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
To understand how language works, we look, fi rst, to the cooperative functions that various language forms perform, understanding these on a biological model as what they accomplish for both speaker and hearer that keeps them in circulation. Next we look at language mechanics, at how language forms perform their functions. For many (but not all) l...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Many different things are said to have meaning: people mean to do various things; tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things; representations in people's minds also presumably mean things. In Varieties of Meaning, Ruth Garrett Millikan argues that these...
Abstract (2 leaves) bound with copy. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Connecticut, 2003. Includes bibliographical references.
Bibliography of *Varieties of Meaning* (Jean Nicod Lectures 2002, expanded version).
The target article can be strengthened by supplementing it with a better theory of mental representation. Given such a theory, there is reason to suppose that, first, even the most primitive representations are mostly of distal affairs; second, the most primitive representations also turn out to be directed two ways at once, both stating facts and...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
I sketch in miniature the whole of my work on the relation between language and thought. Previously I have offered closeups of this terrain in various papers and books, and I reference them freely. But my main purpose here is to explain the relations among the parts, hoping this can serve as a short introduction to my work on language and thought f...
‘According to informational semantics, if it's necessary that a creature can't distinguish Xs from Ys, it follows that the creature can't have a concept that applies to Xs but not Ys.’ (Fodor, 1994, p. 32)
There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in D...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical antici...
Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is...
Something of the relation of my work on substance concepts to Gibsonian theories of perception–action is discussed. What historical relations tie a particular substance concept to a particular substance is discussed.
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Concepts are highly theoretical entities. One cannot study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial preliminary assumptions. Among the competing theories of concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty years, the implicit theoretical assumption that what falls under a concept is determined by descripti...
A number of clarifications of the target article and some
corrections are made. I clarify which concepts the thesis was intended
to be about, what “descriptionism” means, the difference
between “concepts” and “conceptions,” and
why extensions are not determined by conceptions. I clarify the meaning of “substances,” how one knows what inductions...
There are many alternative ways that a mind or brain might represent that two of its representations were of the same object or property, the 'Strawson' model, the 'duplicates' model, the 'synchrony' mode, the 'Christmas lights' model, the 'anaphor' model, and so forth. I first discuss what would constitute that a mind or brain was using one of the...
En reponse a l'article de S. J. Wagner intitule «Teleosemantics and the troubles of naturalism» («Philosophical studies», 82, 1, pp. 81-110) qui critique sa theorie du contenu mental, l'A. corrige les principales erreurs de son detracteur concernant la fonction propre des articles intentionnels, le contenu semantique des representations indicatives...
Moreover, when we look still more closely at the life bush, examining in detail the various lineages that form the littlest twigs (the species), we see the same pattern over again. The vast majority of individual animals and plants forming these various lineages didn't make it. The twigs are largely made of fuzz--of myriad little lives that broke o...
Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by rules. This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, the way they express norms and conventions. It argues that the central norms applying to language are non-evaluative; they are mo...
Ruth Millikan's extended argument for a biological view of the study of cognition in Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories caught the attention of the philosophical community. Universally regarded as an important, even brilliant, work, its complexity and dense presentation made it difficult to plumb. This collection of essays serves bo...
La teleosemantique designe une relation teleofonctionnelle de ce qui determine le contenu semantique des representations internes. Millikan et Dretske acceptent les relations teleologiques alors que Fodor rejette la teleosemantique
Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, Ruth Millikan argues that the intentionality of language can be described without reference to speaker intentions and that an understanding of the intentionality of thought can and should be divorced from the problem of...
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