Millikan and Her Critics E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Philosophers and their Critics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 804

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Millikan and Her Critics offers a unique critical discussion of Ruth Millikan's highly regarded, influential, and systematic contributions to philosophy of mind and language, philosophy of biology, epistemology, and metaphysics. These newly written contributions present discussion from some of the most important philosophers in the field today and include replies from Millikan herself. * Comprises 13 new essays that critically examine the highly regarded and influential work of Ruth Millikan * Covers a wide range of Millikan's most important work, from philosophy of mind and language to philosophy of biology * Features contributions by some of the most important and influential philosophers working today * Includes original replies to critics by Millikan

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

FOREWORD

A MILLIKAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Proper Functions

Representations: The Basic Teleosemantic Framework

Concepts

Externalism, Language, and Meaning Rationalism

1 TOWARD AN INFORMATIONAL TELEOSEMANTICS

Introduction

Response Functions

Information and Singular Causation

The Functions of Sensory Representations

The Contents of Sensory Representations: The Problem of Error

The Contents of Sensory Representation: The Distality Problem

REPLY TO NEANDER

2 SIGNALS, ICONS, AND BELIEFS

Introduction

Senders and Receivers

Content

States of the Mind and Brain

REPLY TO GODFREY-SMITH

3 MILLIKAN’S ISOMORPHISM REQUIREMENT

Introduction

Isomorphism and Functional Isomorphism

Millikan’s Reliance on Functional Isomorphism

Isomorphisms and Productivity

Exploiting 1–1 Maps Which Preserve Natural Relations

Conclusion

REPLY TO SHEA

4 MILLIKAN ON HONEYBEE NAVIGATION AND COMMUNICATION

Insect Cognition

The Science of Honeybee Navigation and Communication

Representation and Truth-Conditions

Psychological Structure

Pushmi-Pullyu Representations

Folk Psychology as an Explanatory Paradigm

REPLY TO RESCORLA

5 CONCEPTS: USEFUL FOR THINKING

Abilities

Concepts

Conclusion

REPLY TO ANTONY

6 PROPERTIES OVER SUBSTANCE

REPLY TO FUMERTON

7 MILLIKAN’S HISTORICAL KINDS

Introduction: Russell’s Natural Kinds

Is Biological Homeostasis Historical?

Intrinsic Properties Redux

Population Structure

Conclusion: Are Species Duplicable?

REPLY TO MATTHEN

8 MILLIKAN, REALISM, AND SAMENESS

I

II

III

IV

REPLY TO ELDER

9 CRANING THE ULTIMATE SKYHOOK: MILLIKAN ON THE LAW OF NONCONTRADICTION

Introduction and Conspectus: Naturalizing the Logical Modalities

The Law of Noncontradiction and Possible Worlds

Craning Noncontradiction

Natural Necessity and Metaphysical Necessity in Millikan’s Philosophy

The Son, the Daughter, and the Mighty Dead: Debunking the Myth of the Logical Given

REPLY TO NUSSBAUM

10 ARE MILLIKAN’S CONCEPTS INSIDE-OUT?

Introduction

Innerism and Outerism

Are Some Concepts Inside-Out?

Millikan’s Concepts

REPLY TO PRINZ

11 THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEANING

Introduction

Section 1

Section 2

Conclusion

REPLY TO MACDONALDS

12 WEASELS AND THE A PRIORI

The Proliferation of Handles

Why the Two-Dimensionalist Needs Millikan’s Positive Story

Nodding Along to the Positive Story

So What is There to Disagree About?

When is a Term a Natural Kind Term?

What Role Does the Deference to Naturalness Play in Natural Kind Terms and Concepts?

The Commonality between Narrowly Similar Agents

Some Arguments and Some Diagnoses

Two Projects

REPLY TO BRADDON-MITCHELL

13 ALL IN THE FAMILY

Locating the Fault Line: Rules and Roles, Norms and Causes

Some Sellarsian Geophysics

Games, Conventions, Rules, Norms, and Essential Perspectives

REPLY TO DEVRIES: A DAUGHTER’S RESPECTFUL DISAGREEMENT WITH SELLARS

AFTERWORD

REFERENCES

INDEX

PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR CRITICS

General Editor: Ernest Lepore

Philosophy is an interactive enterprise. Much of it is carried out in dialogue as theories and ideas are presented and subsequently refined in the crucible of close scrutiny. The purpose of this series is to reconstruct this vital interplay among thinkers. Each book consists of a temporary assessment of an important living philosopher’s work. A collection of essays written by an interdisciplinary group of critics addressing the substantial theses of the philosopher’s corpus opens each volume. In the last section, the philosopher responds to his or her critics, clarifies crucial points of the discussion, or updates his or her doctrines.

1 Dretske and His Critics    Edited by Brian McLaughlin

2 John Searle and His Critics    Edited by Ernest Lepore and Robert van Gulick

3 Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics    Edited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey

4 Dennett and His Critics    Edited by Bo Dahlbom

5 Danto and His Critics    Edited by Mark Rollins

6 Perspectives on Quine    Edited by Robert B. Barrett and Roger F. Gibson

7 The Churchlands and Their Critics    Edited by Robert N. McCauley

8 Singer and His Critics    Edited by Dale Jamieson

9 Rorty and His Critics    Edited by Robert B. Brandom

10 Chomsky and His Critics    Edited by Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein

11 Dworkin and His Critics    Edited by Justine Burley

12 McDowell and His Critics    Edited by Cynthia Macdonald and Graham Macdonald

13 Stich and His Critics    Edited by Dominic Murphy and Michael Bishop

14 Danto and His Critics, 2nd Edition    Edited by Mark Rollins

15 Millikan and Her Critics    Edited by Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury, and Kenneth Williford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Millikan and her critics / edited by Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury, and Kenneth Williford.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-65684-6 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-65685-3 (pbk.) 1. Millikan, Ruth Garrett. I. Ryder, Dan (Thomas Daniel) II. Kingsbury, Justine. III. Williford, Kenneth.B945.M487M55 2013191–dc23

2012032812

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Photo of Ruth Millikan © Steve Pyke.Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Louise Antony is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has published many papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ­epistemology, and feminist theory, and has also edited Philosophers without Gods (2007), Chomsky and His Critics (2003), and (with Charlotte Witt) A Mind of One’s Own (1993).David Braddon-Mitchell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of numerous papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ­metaphysics, and co-author (with Frank Jackson) of The Philosophy of Mind andCognition (1996).Daniel C. Dennett is Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Breaking the Spell (2006), Freedom Evolves (2003), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Consciousness Explained (1992), The Intentional Stance (1987), and many other books and papers in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, free will, philosophy of biology, and secularism.Willem A. deVries is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of Wilfrid Sellars (2005), Knowledge, Mind, and the Given (with Timm Triplett), and numerous papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ­metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy.Crawford L. Elder is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Familiar Objects and their Shadows (2011), Real Natures and Familiar Objects (2004), and a large number of papers in both metaphysics and philosophy of mind.Richard Fumerton is F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Epistemology (2006), Realism and the Correspondence Theory of Truth (2002), Metaepistemology and Skepticism (1995), Metaphysical and Epistemological Problems of Perception (1985), and numerous papers in epistemology, philosophy of ­language, and metaphysics.Peter Godfrey-Smith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), Theory and Reality (2003), and Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996), as well as many papers in philosophy of biology and philosophy of science.Cynthia Macdonald is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, and Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury. She is the author of Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics (2005) and Mind-Body Identity Theories (1989), the editor of a large number of collections, and has published many papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.Graham Macdonald is Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, and Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author (with Philip Pettit) of Semantics and Social Science (1981, reissued 2011), the editor of many collections, including Emergence in Mind (2010) (with Cynthia Macdonald) and Teleosemantics (2007) (with David Papineau), and has published numerous papers in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of ­biology, and philosophy of social science.Mohan Matthen is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy, Perception and Communication at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Seeing, Doing and Knowing (2007), and many papers in the philosophy of perception, philosophy of biology, and ancient ­philosophy.Karen Neander is Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, and the author of a large number of papers in philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology. Her ­forthcoming book is entitled Mental Representation: The Natural and the Normative in aDarwinian World.Charles Nussbaum is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is the author of The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (2007) and numerous papers in philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and Kant.Jesse Prinz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Beyond Human Nature (2012), The Emotional Construction of Morals (2007), Gut Reactions (2004), Furnishing the Mind (2002), and many papers in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, moral psychology, and aesthetics.Michael Rescorla is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of computation, philosophy of language, and epistemology.Nicholas Shea is Reader in Philosophy at King’s College, London. He is the author of On Millikan (2004) and a large number of papers in philosophy of mind, cognitive ­science, and philosophy of biology.

FOREWORD

Philosophy is a dirty job. Cleaning up the confusions and obstinate misunderstandings of less philosophically astute folks would be hard enough without having to contend with all the dust kicked up by the efforts of other philosophers, vying with each other to do the same job better. Then there is the relentless tug of received opinion, creating “fixed points” that are better ignored – if only you could persuade others of this. In this ­churning melee of would-be conceptual cleansers, Ruth Garrett Millikan stands out, quite literally, as a calm, resolute, resourceful defender and developer of a growing family of insights – the Millikan vision, you might call it – that puts a surprisingly large number of ­contentious and utterly central issues in a better light: How can our words have meanings? How can our brains represent the world? How can knowledge be acquired in perception and passed on in communication?

This volume reveals the range and power of her vision, while also highlighting just how difficult it is to keep the alluring misconceptions at bay. Millikan’s “take” on the issues is typically so orthogonal to the prevailing presumptions that she has had to devise a special vocabulary to keep her readers from falling back into the bad habits of thought she is exposing: Normal (with its capital N) and proper functions and the concept/conception distinction, to name some key examples. Some of these innovations have worked better than others, and she has revised Millikanese over the years to deal with the most ­persistent miscommunications. (We can expect more improvements in the future. Her much-­misunderstood use of the term empirical concept may soon be replaced by a neologism: unicept. Stay tuned.)

There is nothing new about philosophers insisting on creating proprietary idiolects – think of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger – but unlike some of the others, she takes on the burden of explaining why her innovations are good moves, instead of simply brandishing them, as philosophers often do, leaving the task of comprehension as an exercise for the uninitiated. This constructive spirit is well exhibited in the essays here and especially in Millikan’s responses, but one can hear a few echoes of the ferocious reactions her work triggered in the early days. I recall all too well the colossally rude dismissiveness she encountered in some quarters when she first presented her revolutionary arguments, so I particularly relish my role here in setting the stage for her vindication. On the strength of this volume I would say that she has finally succeeded in domesticating her critics, always setting a good example of how to conduct oneself in discussion.

I have often told the tale of how I came to learn of Ruth and her work, and I gather the tale has taken on a life of its own, as retold tales do, with mutations and embellishments – including some of my own, I now see – so this is a good place to try to set down the unvarnished truth, as I reconstruct it thanks to the fact that my correspondence over the years now resides, alphabetized in yearly cartons, in Tufts’ library. It was short work, recently, for an archivist to extract all my early correspondence with Ruth, from her very first letter of February 12, 1979:

Dear Professor Dennett:Enclosed is a manuscript completed just before reading your … Brainstorms. Both my ­colleagues here at Connecticut and I had considered this paper of mine to be hopelessly maverick.… But the orientation is strikingly like that of Brainstorms, certainly if you ­contrast it with current approaches in the philosophy of language.… My view of ­representations has a different slant from yours. I am not sure how different in the end, but would be immensely pleased to have your view of the matter….

Sincerely,Ruth Garrett Millikan

Hopelessly maverick, but strikingly like my own orientation? I was not sure I wanted to give this unsolicited manuscript from an unknown author so much as a skim. It could well be an unintended reductio ad absurdum or parody – the line is sometimes hard to draw – of my work. The letter and manuscript had been forwarded to me in Oxford, where I was spending a sabbatical, so months had passed in those pre-email days, but skim it I eventually did, and wrote back in May, apologizing for not doing it justice because of deadlines I faced: “I could easily see the convergence in our work that prompted you to write, and my initial reaction is that your fundamental idea about the evolution of linguistic features is perfectly plausible and well worth pursuing.” Not much encouragement, I now see, but enough, thank goodness, to keep me on her mailing list. Her swift reply revealed that the “warm response” of Philip Pettit, who was visiting at UConn then, “has encouraged me that it may be of some value.” Good eye, Philip! Soon (October 25, 1979) she began to “inundate” me with drafts. Later, in March, 1980, she reciprocated my cautious blessing of her work by providing a much needed boost to me, after I had sent her a draft of “Beyond Belief,” which was tormenting me that year.

Dear Dan Dennett,Thank you for the packet of ideas. The argument that de re and de dicto aren’t two kinds of belief seems to me to be right on and to cut through to what needs to be explained much better and more fully than has been done before….

Thank you, Ruth! I needed that. The letter went on for pages of insightful questions and criticisms that preview some of her more recent discussions of the relations between ­representations and the world they mesh with. (“Those possible worlds. I sense that you have your doubts too? One trouble with them is that they offer no friction, no resistance, hence no foothold or ‘constraints’. Are worlds with phlogiston and witches in them ­possible worlds?”) She ended the letter by urging me not to read the manuscript she had recently sent me, of which she was “ashamed,” and especially to ignore her definition of “proper function” therein. She was replacing it with a better version (“medium bulky” – uh-oh) that would soon be sent to me.

The next mailing, in November of 1980, included drafts of the first chapters of a book, “… now (provocatively) titled Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories.” (The title was, of course, perfect. That’s exactly what the Millikan vision is about.) She added:

I find that I have to rewrite and rewrite and, especially, expand before anything that I have to say becomes understandable. Exhausting work! And painful, since I have so much already thought out and drafted that I want to communicate about but that will undoubtedly have to go through a long long series of revisions first.

The bulky chapters began arriving. I read them in the summer of 1981 and thought they were terrific, though in need of further editing. With Ruth’s permission, I sent them to my friend and publisher, Harry Stanton at Bradford Books, MIT Press, urging him to triangulate my enthusiasm with at least two other referees, since maybe I was hopelessly maverick myself, and shouldn’t be trusted. Fred Dretske and Hector-Neri Castañeda were the other philosophers Harry consulted – a wide tripod indeed – and they were equally enthusiastic, so Bradford Books became the home of her landmark book. I did some energetic editorial work on it with her and wrote the foreword. Ruth and I had still never met, or even, I think, talked on the phone. When she learned that we were finally going to meet at an APA division meeting cocktail party, she sent me a note warning me – in case I had been encouraging her over the years under the misapprehension that I was taking a sweet young thing under my arm! – that she was older than I was, a mother with grown children. I had already figured that out; nobody could have written LTOBC ­without mastering – overcoming might be a better term – the literature, and spending years of hard thinking putting the pieces in the right places.

And ever since she built her wonderful Millikan machine, it has proved to be a ­prodigious generator of further philosophical enlightenment, requiring some maintenance and improvement to be sure, but as robust and extensible as any explanatory system in philosophy. The key to its power lies in its unwavering – and demanding – biological naturalism; she never lets you forget that minds aren’t magic, that they have to have evolved just the way hearts and livers had to evolve. Many would-be naturalists among philosophers of mind and language have underestimated the necessity of seeing these issues from the reverse engineering perspective of evolution by natural selection: What do these things have to do to earn their keep, and how could they possibly come to do it?

Just as important, what needn’t they do? Much philosophical theorizing attributes ­stupendous powers to mental events and dispositions that are strictly gratuitous, which is a good thing, since they are almost certainly impossible. I have come to recognize in recent years that perhaps the central revolutionary idea Darwin gave us, his “strange inversion of reasoning” (Dennett 2009), is the idea of competence without comprehension. We tend to think – especially if we are philosophers – that competence must flow from comprehension, that first we need to comprehend in order to be competent. (“Meaning rationalism” was Millikan’s term for this ubiquitous conviction in LTOBC.) No, it’s the other way around, actually: our comprehension is the product of cascades of semi-comprehending, pseudo-comprehending, uncomprehending competences that we are endowed with, first by natural selection and then by learning and cultural – especially linguistic – redesign.

Perhaps Millikan’s key insight is that our ability to identify and reidentify things and properties in the world, without which we could not acquire the knowledge and ­comprehension we have, starts with an innate perceptual proclivity to (try to) identify distal things, a competence that we exercise without knowing – or having to know – how or why it works. Upon this evolved foundation the structure of the distal world shapes our empirical concepts, letting us learn what we ought to learn first about the world we live in. As she says, “… the ability to reidentify things that are objectively the same when we encounter them in perception is the most central cognitive ability that we possess” (OCCI, 109), and this ability – having, in her sense, a concept of a thing – does not depend on any particular conception (definition, intension, mode of presentation, etc.) we may have of it.

As she has insisted, “Failure to account for our capacity to represent individuals in language and thought has been, perhaps, the most serious failing common to ­contemporary naturalist theories of content” (VOM, 43), and it has been her achievement to repair that failing. The result is not a minor difference in outlook among philosophers of language and mind: either you are with Millikan – you get it, and see that one way or another a brand of “teleofunctionalism” is the only way to make sense of meaning – or you are doomed to recycle the pre-Darwinian fantasies that have continued to beguile so many deep thinkers for more than a century after the Origin of Species. Millikan may be the maverick, but the hopelessness lies on the other side of the fence.

Daniel C. DennettBlue Hill, ME

A MILLIKAN BIBLIOGRAPHY

1969

Empirical Identity. Dissertation in philosophy, Yale University (Sterling Library).

1979

“An Evolutionist Approach to Language,” Philosophy Research Archives, 5(4).

1983

“Dennett’s Rational Animals: How Behaviorism Overlooked Them,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6: 372–373.

1984

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (“LTOBC”)

1984

“Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 65(4): 315–334.

1986

“Thoughts Without Laws: Cognitive Science With Content,” Philosophical Review, 95: 47–80.

1986

“The Price of Correspondence Truth,” Noûs, 20(4): 453–468.

1986

“Metaphysical Antirealism?” Mind, 95(380): 417–431.

1986

“Of What Use Categories?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 9(4): 163–164.

1987

“Review of Christopher Hookway’s Minds, Machines, and Evolution,” Noûs, 21(2): 95–98.

1987

“What Peter Thinks When He Hears Mary Speak,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(4): 725–726.

1989

“Biosemantics,” Journal of Philosophy, 86: 281–297.

1989

“In Defense of Proper Functions,” Philosophy of Science, 56(2): 288–302.

1989

“An Ambiguity in the Notion “Function’,” Biology and Philosophy, 4(2): 172–176.

1990

“Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke–Wittgenstein Paradox,” Philosophical Review, 99(3): 323–353.

1990

“Compare and Contrast Dretske, Fodor and Millikan on Teleosemantics,” Philosophical Topics, 18(2): 151–161.

1990

“The Myth of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs, 24(5): 723–734.

1990

“Seismograph Readings for Explaining Behavior” (review of Fred Dretske’s Explaining Behavior), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50(4): 807–812.

1990

“Clarifications on Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories,” Annals of Scholarship, 7: 147–149.

1991

“Speaking Up for Darwin,” in B. Loewer and G. Rey (eds.) Meaning in Mind: Fodor and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 151–164.

1991

“Perceptual Content and Fregean Myth,” Mind, 100(4): 439–459.

1992

“Review of Robert Cummins’ Meaning and Mental Representation,” Philosophical Review, 101(2): 422–425.

1992

“Review of Jerry Fodor’s A Theory of Content,” Philosophical Review, 101(4): 898–901.

1993

White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (“WQ”)

1993

“Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain,” in WQ: 31–50.

1993

“A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology: What is Behavior (part 1) and The Green Grass Growing All Around (part 2),” in WQ: 135–170.

1993

“White Queen Psychology; or, The Last Myth of the Given,” in WQ: 279–363.

1993

“Knowing What I’m Thinking Of,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 67: 109–124.

1993

“Explanation in Biopsychology,” in J. Heil and A. Mele (eds.) Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–232.

1993

“On Mentalese Orthography,” in B. Dahlbom (ed.) Dennett and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 97–123.

1993

“Content and Vehicle,” in N. Eilan, R. McCarthy, B. Brewer (eds.) Spatial Representation. Oxford: Blackwell, 256–268.

1994

“On Unclear and Indistinct Ideas,” in J. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives vol. 8. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 75–100.

1995

“Reply: A Bet with Peacocke,” in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.) Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation. Oxford: Blackwell, 285–292.

1995

“Pojecia Syntetyczne: Filozoficzne Rozwazania o Kategoryzacji,” Roczniki Filozoficzne, 43(1): 165–180.

1996

“Pushmi-pullyu Representations,” in J. Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives vol. 9. Atascadero CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 185–200.

1996

“On Swampkinds,” Mind and Language, 11: 103–117.

1996

“Varieties of Purposive Behavior,” in R. Mitchell (ed.) Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals. Albany: SUNY Press, 189–197.

1997

“Images of Identity: In Search of Modes of Presentation,” Mind, 106: 499–519.

1997

“Troubles with Wagner’s Reading of Millikan,” Philosophical Studies, 86(1): 93–96.

1998

“Language Conventions Made Simple,” Journal of Philosophy, 95(4): 161–180.

1998

“Cognitive Luck: Externalism in an Evolutionary Frame,” in P. Machamer and M. Carrier (eds.) Philosophy and the Sciences of Mind. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press and Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 207–219.

1998

“A Common Structure for Concepts of Individuals, Stuffs and Basic Kinds: More Mama, More Milk and More Mouse,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 22(1): 55–65.

1998

“With Enemies Like These I don’t Need Friends: Author’s Response,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 22(1): 89–100.

1998

“Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts,” in L. E. Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy of Peter F. Strawson: The Library of Living Philosophers. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 25–43.

1998

“How We Make Our Ideas Clear,” The Tenth Annual Patrick Romanell Lecture, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 72(2): 65–79.

1998

“A More Plausible Kind of ‘Recognitional Concept’,” in E. Villanueva (ed.) Concepts, Philosophical Issues vol. 9. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 35–41.

1998

“Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature,” Philosophy of Science, 65(2): 375–377.

1999

“Wings, Spoons, Pills and Quills: A Pluralist Theory of Functions,” Journal of Philosophy, 96(4): 191–206.

1999

“Historical Kinds and the Special Sciences,” Philosophical Studies, 95: 45–65.

1999

“Reply to Boyd,” Philosophical Studies, 95: 99–102.

1999

“On Sympathies with J. J. Gibson, and on Focusing Reference,” replies to Treffner and Saidel, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22(4): 732–733.

2000

On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay about Substance Concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (“OCCI”)

2000

“Naturalizing Intentionality,” in B. Elevitch (ed.) Philosophy of Mind, Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy vol. 9. Charlottesville: Philosophy Documentation Center, 83–90.

2000

“Representations, Targets and Attitudes (discussion with Robert Cummins),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(1): 103–111.

2000

“Reading Mother Nature’s Mind,” in D. Ross, A. Brook, and D. Thompson (eds.) Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 55–75.

2001

“What has Natural Information to do with Intentional Representation?” in D. Walsh (ed.) Evolution, Naturalism and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 105–126.

2001

“Purposes and Cross-Purposes: On the Evolution of Language and Languages,” Monist, 84(3): 392–416.

2001

“The Language–Thought Partnership: A Bird’s-Eye View,” in H. J. Glock (ed.) Language and Communication, 21: 157–166.

2001

“Cutting Philosophy of Language Down to Size,” in A. O’Hear (ed.) Philosophy at the New Millennium, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplementary Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 125–140.

2001

“The Myth of Mental Indexicals” (revised version of “The Myth of the Essential Indexical”), in A. Brook and R. DeVidi (eds.) Self-Reference and Self-Awareness: Advances in Consciousness Research vol. 11. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 163–177.

2001

“A Theory of Representation to Complement TEC,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5): 894–895.

2002

“Biofunctions: Two Paradigms,” in R. Cummins, A. Ariew, and M. Perlman (eds.) Functions: New Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113–143.

2003

“In Defense of Public Language,” in L. M. Antony and N. Hornstein (eds.) Chomsky and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 215–237.

2003

“Teleological Theories of Mental Content,” in L. Nadel (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. New York: Macmillan.

2003

“Vom angeblichen Siegeszug der Gene und der Meme” [“On the Rumored Takeover by the Genes and the Memes”] in Becker et al. (eds.) Gene, Meme und Gehirne. Geist und Gesellschaft als Natur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 90–111.

2004

Varieties of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (“VOM”)

2004

“On Reading Signs: Some Differences between Us and the Others,” in D. K. Oller and U. Griebel (eds.) Evolution of Communication Systems: A ComparativeApproach. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

2004

“Existence Proof for a Viable Externalism,” in R. Schantz (ed.) Current Issues in Theoretical Philosophy II: The Externalist Challenge. New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality. New York: de Gruyter, 227–238.

2005

“The Son and the Daughter: On Sellars, Brandom, and Millikan,” Pragmatics and Cognition, 13: 59–72.

2005

Language: A Biological Model. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (“LBM”)

2005

“On Meaning, Meaning, and Meaning,” in LBM: 53–76.

2005

“Some Reflections on the Theory Theory–Simulation Theory Debate,” in S. Hurley and N. Chater (eds.) Perspectives on Imitation: From Mirror Neuronsto Memes vol 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 182–188.

2005

“Why (Most) Concepts are not Categories,” in H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre (eds.) Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 305–315.

2006

“Styles of Rationality,” in M. Nudds and S. Hurley (eds.) Rationality in Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 117–126.

2006

“Useless Content,” in G. Macdonald and D. Papineau (eds.) Teleosemantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 100–114.

2006

“Précis of Language: A Biological Model” and replies to reviewers, SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review 5(2), http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/mind/swifpmr.htm.

2007

“An Input Condition for Teleosemantics? Reply to Shea (and Godfrey-Smith),” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75(2): 436–455.

2007

“Précis of Varieties of Meaning: The Jean Nicod Lectures 2002” and responses to reviews by Bermúdez, Recanati, Rosenberg, and Taylor, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75(3).

2008

“A Difference of Some Consequence between Conventions and Rules,” Topoi, 27: 87–100.

2008

“Biosemantics,” in B. McLaughlin (ed.) The Oxford Handbook in the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 394–406.

2009

“Embedded Rationality,” in M. Aydede and P. Robbins (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 171–181.

2010

“On Knowing the Meaning; with a Coda on Swampman,” Mind, 119(473): 43–81.

2010

“It’s Likely Misbelief Never has a Function,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(6): 529–530.

2010

“Gedacht wird in der Welt, nicht im Kopf” (interview with Markus Wild), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 58(6): 981–1000.

2011

“Loosing the Word–Concept Tie,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 85: 125–143.

2011

“Die eingebettete Vernunft,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 59(4): 483–496.

2011

“Commentary on Pautz,” Consciousness Online 3, http://consciousnessonline.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/commentary-on-pautz-ruth-millikan2.pdf.

2012

“Natural Signs,” in S. B. Cooper, A. Dawar, and B. Löwe (eds.) How the World Computes: Seventh Conference on Computability in Europe (CiE 2012), Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Heidelberg: Springer.

2012

“What’s Inside a Thinking Animal,” XXII Deutscher Kongress für Philosophy, Proceedings Welt der Gründe, Kolloquium 19, Action and decision in non-human animals: Do animals live in the space of reason?: 889–893.

2012

“Spracherwerb ohne eine Theorie des Geistes” [“Language Acquisition Without a Theory of Mind”], in A. Burri (trans.) Biosemantik. Sprachphilosophische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Surkamp Verlag: 85–115.

2012

“Are There Mental Indexicals and Demonstratives?” Philosophical Perspectives, 26(1).

Forthcoming

   “Troubles with Plantinga’s reading of Millikan,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Forthcoming

   “Accidents,” 2012 John Dewey Lecture (Central APA), Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association.

Forthcoming

   “Teleosemantics,” in B. Kaldis (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Forthcoming

   “Natural Information, Intentional Signs and Animal Communication,” in U. Stegmann (ed.) Animal Communication Theory: Information and Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Forthcoming

   “An Epistemology for Phenomenology?,” in R. Brown (ed.) Consciousness Inside and Out: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience. Berlin: Springer.

Forthcoming

   “The Tangle of Biological Purposes that is Us,” in B. Bashour and H. Muller (eds.) Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications. London: Routledge.

Forthcoming

   “Confessions of a Renegade Daughter,” in J. Shea (ed.) Sellars and His Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Forthcoming

   “What do Thoughts do to the World? Deflating Socially Constituted Objects,” in M. Gallotti and J. Michael (eds.) Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, Volume I. Heidelberg: Springer.

INTRODUCTION

DAN RYDER, JUSTINE KINGSBURY, AND KENNETH WILLIFORD

Ruth Millikan’s work is notable for its originality, scope, and coherence, and for its ­unwavering naturalism, with her focus on the proper functions of our cognitive and ­linguistic mechanisms as the unifying thread. Besides her meticulously worked-out and comprehensive theory of mind and language, she has made important contributions to philosophy of biology (especially to the discussion of biological functions), epistemology (especially on the nature of empirical knowledge), and metaphysics (especially the ­metaphysics of natural kinds).

Millikan’s first book, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (“LTOBC”), appeared in 1984. It was followed by a steady stream of articles (some of them collected in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (“WQ,” 1993) and by three further books: On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay About Substance Concepts (“OCCI,” 2000), Varieties of Meaning (“VOM,” 2004), and Language: A Biological Model (“LBM,” 2005). (A bibliography of Millikan’s works can be found on p. xiii.) LTOBC was striking both for the novelty of its ideas and for its density. Many of the views defended in Millikan’s copious later philosophical output, along with the arguments for those views, were already there in the 333 pages of LTOBC. It is unsurprising that many found the book hard to get to grips with. It earned her a reputation for being a difficult philosopher; a reputation that those who have read her later, more expansive work know to be undeserved, or at least greatly exaggerated.

This volume contains thirteen new essays on the work of Ruth Millikan, along with Millikan’s replies to each. The philosophical range of the contributors is a testament to the breadth of Millikan’s contribution to philosophy. Karen Neander in “Toward an Informational Teleosemantics,” Peter Godfrey-Smith in “Signals, Icons, and Beliefs,” Nicholas Shea in “Millikan’s Isomorphism Requirement,” and Michael Rescorla in “Millikan on Honeybee Navigation and Communication” take up issues concerning Millikan’s teleological account of mental content. In “Concepts: Useful for Thinking,” Louise Antony takes exception to various features of Millikan’s account of concepts. Richard Fumerton’s “Properties over Substance” is a critical examination of Millikan’s claim (in OCCI) that substance concepts are ontologically and epistemologically prior to other concepts. Mohan Matthen in “Millikan’s Historical Kinds” and Crawford Elder in “Millikan, Realism, and Sameness” discuss Millikan’s account of natural kinds; in Elder’s case this is on the way to considering whether or not Millikan is a realist about objects. Charles Nussbaum writes about a Millikanian approach to naturalizing the law of ­noncontradiction (“Craning the Ultimate Skyhook: Millikan on the Law of Noncontradiction”).