Ruth Millikan

Most category words do not designate classes but units of another kind entirely. These units are called “real kinds,” among which are “historical kinds” and “eternal kinds”. The ontology of historical kinds and eternal kinds is compared to that of individuals, and it is argued that just as in the case of individuals, different people may identify the same real kinds in different ways, so that no particular set of properties or paradigms or exemplars will be definitional of any word designating the kind.

The conventionality of natural language is captured in much simpler terms than David Lewis’s, displaying its continuity with more rudimentary conventions involving neither coordinations, regular conformity (either de facto or de jure) nor rational underpinnings. This “natural conventionality” is composed of two simple characteristics:(1) natural conventions are reproduced patterns, (2) they are proliferated due partly to weight of precedent, rather than due, for example, to their intrinsically superior capacity to perform certain functions. These two characteristics are discussed as they characterize simple non-coordinating conventions, then simple coordination conventions, and finally language conventions. The paper argues that the conception of conventions universally adopted in speech act theory is mistaken, and points to a new way of understand the nature of illocutionary acts.

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 without function or “attitude”.

Pushmi-pullyu representations (P-PRs) are in one breath both descriptive and directive, the simplest being animal’s signals to conspecifics, such as danger signals and mating displays. P-PRs also appear in human language: “No Johnny, we don’t eat peas with our fingers”; “The meeting is (hereby) adjourned”. Human intentions are P-PRS in thought, as are perceptual representations representing affordances. Inner representations of the social roles that we play as we play them are P-PRS, as we fall into doing “what one does”. These primitive ways of thinking are an essential glue holding human societies together.

Chomsky has claimed that both common sense and technical notions of public language or “externalized language” are confused, ill-defined, or of no scientific interest. This chapter agrees with Chomsky’s criticisms of the various notions of public language with which he is concerned. But given the right understanding of language conventions and the right understanding of the functions of public language, public language is the raison d’etre and the foundation on which inner language is built and maintained.

A new analysis of convention and of linguistic function yields a robust description, in naturalistic terms, of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. For a number of different but instructive reasons, this distinction is intrinsically blurry, depending on statistics over individual psychological processing techniques. Implications for the theory of language interpretation are discussed, with the conclusion drawn that there are many ways of grasping the content that the specific speaker intends to convey without employing a theory of mind. A coordinate claim is that during normal conversation, it is not language that is most directly perceived by the hearer but rather the world that is most directly perceived through language.

Two mistaken assumptions lay at the heart of the mid-century philosophy of language. First, unlike the act of knowing an empirical fact, the act of referentially meaning something, though perhaps not of actually referring to something, is completed within the mind itself. Second, a univocal term in a public language is associated with a psychological state common to all competent users. It is shown how to deny both assumptions by showing that the purpose of a thinker intending a certain referent is not a psychological purpose, but a biological purpose.

This chapter traces the staggering debt the author’s views owe to Sellars, including the rejection of the given; the need for scientific theory construction in order to understand mind and language; externalism and a representational or ‘picturing’ correspondence with the world (along with coherence as the test of correspondence); and intentionality as the key explanandum in the philosophy of mind. But there are three shifts away: (1) the “Norms of nature” that define intentionality are grounded more deeply in natural selection than in terms of the social and psychological conditioning involved in Sellars’s inferentialist ‘language game’ analysis; (2) whereas for Sellars the norms that define intentionality derive from social linguistic norms, here intentionality is constituted solely by the Norms that govern the natural representational correspondences generated at the level of what Sellars called ‘picturing’ the world; and this enables (3) the rejection of the ‘inferentialist’ conception of language and thought.

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 more like those norms of function and behavior that account for the survival and proliferation of biological species. Specific linguistic forms survive and are reproduced together with cooperative hearer responses because some portion of the time these patterns of production and response benefit both speakers and hearers. What needs to be reproduced, however, for a given language to survive is not specific conceptual rules or inference patterns, but only satisfaction conditions concerning distal objects and properties, and essential elements of hearer response. Thus, the psychological processes that support the use of proper names, of words for kinds, properties and so forth, need to be examined anew, resulting in a fairly uncompromising rejection of conceptual analysis as a tool in philosophy. Further results concern the distinction between the propositional content and the force of a linguistic utterance and a new description of illocutionary acts. It turns out that neither the intentionality of thought nor the intentionality of language is derived from the other. Also, the processes involved in understanding language are best modeled as a form of direct perception of the world parallel, for example, to perception mediated by the natural signs contained in structured light, and results in a radically new description of how children learn language.

This is a response to Christie, Brusse, et al., ‘Are biological traits explained by their “selected effect” functions?’ The interest of their paper is that it draws our attention to those cases in which changes in a population that are brought about by natural selection in turn bring about changes in the environment that alter the selectionist pressures that were responsible for the original changes. Much of the paper, however, is an argument that the notion of a ‘proper function’ introduced in my Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (LTOBC), exhibits deep misunderstandings about the actual workings of natural selection. Very little that they say about ‘proper functions’ and related notions from LTOBC is correct, however. I will not list the errors but I will try to make my uses of ‘proper function’ and certain related terms clearer.

There is, indeed, a form of informational semantics that has this verificationist implication. The original definition of information given in Dretske's Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981, hereafter KFI), when employed as a base for a theory of intentional representation or "content," has this implication. I will argue that, in fact, most of what an animal needs to know about its environment is not available as natural information of this kind. It is true, I believe, that there is one fundamental kind of perception that depends on this kind of natural information, but more sophisticated forms of inner representation do not. It is unclear, however, exactly what "natural information" is supposed to mean, certainly in Fodor's, and even in Dretske's writing. In many places, Dretske seems to employ a softer notion than the one he originally defines. I will propose a softer view of natural information that is, I believe, at least hinted at by Dretske, and show that it does not have verificationist consequences. According to this soft informational semantics, a creature can perfectly well have a representation of Xs without being able to discriminate Xs from Ys

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 intentional interpretation is holistic, hence indeterminate, for the kinds of reasons given by Davidson and Quine. In contrast, I take the design stance to be more basic than the intentional stance. Intentional attributions express our best guesses about the locations of effects of certain kinds of natural design. And although there is often indeterminacy, ambiguity, or vagueness concerning what it is that natural selection (or learning) has selected for, these indeterminacies and vaguenesses are local, not holistic. There is reason to suppose that the better portion of Nature's purposes and the intentional states of her children are determinate in content within quite closely defined limits. I propose to defend this position as well as I can, so as to call from Dennett his own views on precisely where our paths separate (if they really do)