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56What has Natural Information to do with Intentional Representation?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49 105-125. 2001.‘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.’ There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske'sKnowledge and the Flow of Information, when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or ‘content,’ has this implication. I will argue that, in…Read more
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14Replik auf ElderDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58 (6): 975-979. 2010.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 call substances, a category that includes both individuals and real kinds
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110Troubles with Plantinga’s Reading of MillikanPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2): 454-456. 2012.
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60Embedded Rationality1 Philosophers and laymen alike have traditionally assumed that whether you can reason well, make valid inferences, avoid logical mistakes and so forth is entirely a matter of how well the cogs in your head are fashioned and oiled. Partner to this is the assumption that careful reflection is always the method by which we discover whether an inference or reasoning process is correct. In particular, further experience, observation or experiment never bear on the question whethe…Read more
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36Dennett's rational animals: And how behavorism overlooked themBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 372-373. 1983.
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2A bet with PeacockeIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 285--292. 1995.
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347White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for AliceMIT Press. 1993.This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan’s much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan’s central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. In other essays, Millikan clar…Read more
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185Language: A Biological ModelOxford: Clarendon Press. 2005.Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularitie…Read more
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4Varieties of purposive behaviorIn R. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. L. Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 189--197. 1997.
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810In defense of proper functionsPhilosophy of Science 56 (June): 288-302. 1989.I defend the historical definition of "function" originally given in my Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984a). The definition was not offered in the spirit of conceptual analysis but is more akin to a theoretical definition of "function". A major theme is that nonhistorical analyses of "function" fail to deal adequately with items that are not capable of performing their functions
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407Pushmi-pullyu representationsPhilosophical Perspectives 9 185-200. 1995.A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, the representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match wh…Read more
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391Truth, rules, hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradoxPhilosophical Review 99 (3): 323-53. 1990.
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65Existence proof for a viable externalismIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
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117Are there mental indexicals and demonstratives?Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1): 217-234. 2012.
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406The father, the son, and the daughter: Sellars, Brandom, and MillikanPragmatics and Cognition 13 (1): 59-71. 2005.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 of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations …Read more
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Comments on "Millikan's compromised externalism"In Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |