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348White 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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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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179In defense of public languageIn Louise M. Antony & H. Hornstein (eds.), Chomsky and His Critics, Blackwell. 2003.....a notion of 'common, public language' that remains mysterious...useless for any form of theoretical explanation....There is simply no way of making sense of this prong of the externalist theory of meaning and language, as far as I can see, or of any of the work in theory of meaning and philosophy of language that relies on such notions, a statement that is intended to cut rather a large swath. (Chomsky 1995, pp. 48-9) It is a striking fact that despite the constant reliance on some notion of…Read more
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408Pushmi-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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223A Difference of Some Consequence Between Conventions and RulesTopoi 27 (1-2): 87-99. 2008.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 linguistics, in particular, Chomsky’s views on how syntactic forms are passed on, with the sort of view of language acquisition and language change advocated by…Read more
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391Truth, rules, hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradoxPhilosophical Review 99 (3): 323-53. 1990.
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2Explanation in biopsychologyIn John Heil & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation, Oxford University Press. 1993.
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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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67On cognitive luck: Externalism in an evolutionary frameIn Peter K. Machamer & Martin Carrier (eds.), Philosophy and the Sciences of Mind, . 1997."Paleontologists like to say that to a first approximation, all species are extinct (ninety- nine percent is the usual estimate). The organisms we see around us are distant cousins, not great grandparents; they are a few scattered twig-tips of an enormous tree whose branches and trunk are no longer with us." (p. 343-44). The historical life bush consists mainly in dead ends
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453Preface by Daniel C. Dennett Beginning with a general theory of function applied to body organs, behaviors, customs, and both inner and outer representations, ...
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136Reading mother nature's mindIn Don Ross, Andrew Brook & David L. Thompson (eds.), Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment, Mit Press. 2000.I try to focus our differences by examining the relation between what Dennett has termed "the intentional stance" and "the design stance." Dennett takes the intentional stance to be more basic than the design stance. Ultimately it is through the eyes of the intentional stance that both human and natural design are interpreted, hence there is always a degree of interpretive freedom in reading the mind, the purposes, both of Nature and of her children. The reason, or at least a reason, is that int…Read more
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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
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |