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327A more plausible kind of "recognitional concept"Philosophical Issues 9 35-41. 1998.It's a sort of moebus strip argument. Rather than circularly assuming what it should prove, it assumes one of the things Fodor says he has disproved. It assumes that the extensions of those concepts thought by some to be recognitional are in fact controlled by stereotypes. Why do I say that? Because Fodor assumes that what makes an instance of a concept a "good instance" is that it is an average instance, that it sports the properties statistically most commonly found among instances of that con…Read more
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2Explanation in biopsychologyIn John Heil & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation, Oxford University Press. 1993.
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151On Clear and Confused Ideas: An Essay About Substance ConceptsCambridge University Press. 2000.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 assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her d…Read more
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12Speaking up for DarwinIn Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. pp. 151-164. 1991.
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12Chapter jc W 1 4In Aloysius Martinich (ed.), The Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. pp. 363. 2008.
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73Many students of pragmatics and child language have come to believe that in order to learn a language a child must first have a 'theory of mind,' a grasp that speakers mentally represent the content they would convey when they speak. This view is reinforced by the Gricean theory of communication, according to which speakers intend their words to cause hearers to believe or to do certain things and hearers must recognize these intentions if they are to comply. The view rests on an underlying assu…Read more
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13Replik 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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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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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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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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34Dennett's rational animals: And how behavorism overlooked themBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 372-373. 1983.
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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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345White 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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805In 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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402Pushmi-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
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |