• The Nicod Lectures book.
  •  239
    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
  • The Jean-Nicod Lectures 2002
  •  443
    Language Conventions Made Simple
    Journal of Philosophy 95 (4): 161. 1998.
    At the start of Convention (1969) Lewis says that it is "a platitude that language is ruled by convention" and that he proposes to give us "an analysis of convention in its full generality, including tacit convention not created by agreement." Almost no clause, however, of Lewis's analysis has withstood the barrage of counter examples over the years,1 and a glance at the big dictionary suggests why, for there are a dozen different senses listed there. Left unfettered, convention wanders freely f…Read more
  • Chapter 18 of the Nicod book.
  •  22
    Introduction
    Axiomathes 13 (3): 231-237. 2003.
    Introduction to Millikan's Jean Nicod lectures 2002.
  •  108
    Reply to bermúdez (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.
  •  139
    What 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
  • Empirical Identity
    Dissertation, Yale University. 1969.
  •  419
    Concepts are highly theoretical entities. One cannot study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial preliminary assumptions. Among the competing theories of concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty years, the implicit theoretical assumption that what falls under a concept is determined by description () has never been seriously challenged. I present a nondescriptionist theory of our most basic concepts, which include (1) stuffs (gold, milk), (2)…Read more
  •  187
    Troubles with Plantinga’s Reading of Millikan
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (2): 454-456. 2012.
  •  1
    The Nicod Lectures book.
  •  345
    The myth of the essential indexical
    Noûs 24 (5): 723-734. 1990.
  • the Nicod Lectures book.
  •  138
    Meaning and Mental Representation
    Philosophical Review 101 (2): 422. 1992.
  • The Jean-Nicod Lectures 2002
  •  145
    It is likely misbelief never has a function
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6): 529-530. 2009.
    I highlight and amplify three central points that McKay & Dennett (M&D) make about the origin of failures to perform biologically proper functions. I question whether even positive illusions meet criteria for evolved misbelief
  •  111
    Reply to Rosenberg (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.
  •  125
    A theory of representation to complement TEC
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 894-895. 2001.
    The target article can be strengthened by supplementing it with a better theory of mental representation. Given such a theory, there is reason to suppose that, first, even the most primitive representations are mostly of distal affairs; second, the most primitive representations also turn out to be directed two ways at once, both stating facts and directing action.
  •  468
    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
  •  663
    Historical kinds and the "special sciences"
    Philosophical Studies 95 (1): 45-65. 1999.
    There are no "special sciences" in Fodor's sense. There is a large group of sciences, "historical sciences," that differ fundamentally from the physical sciences because they quantify over a different kind of natural or real kind, nor are the generalizations supported by these kinds exceptionless. Heterogeneity, however, is not characteristic of these kinds. That there could be an univocal empirical science that ranged over multiple realizations of a functional property is quite problematic. If …Read more
  • Pojecia syntetyczne. Filozoficzne rozwazania o kategoryzacji
    Roczniki Filozoficzne 43 (1): 165. 1995.
  •  4
    Varieties of purposive behavior
    In Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson & H. Lyn Miles (eds.), Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals, Suny Press. pp. 189--197. 1997.
  •  52
    Die eingebettete Vernunft
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 59 (4): 493-496. 2011.
    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. Against this, I argue that good reasoning needs constant empirical support; conceptual clarity is not an a priori, b…Read more
  •  230
    On unclear and indistinct ideas
    Philosophical Perspectives 8 75-100. 1994.
  •  1310
    On Reading Signs; Some Differences between Us and The Others If there are certain kinds of signs that an animal cannot learn to interpret, that might be for any of a number of reasons. It might be, first, because the animal cannot discriminate the signs from one another. For example, although human babies learn to discriminate human speech sounds according to the phonological structures of their native languages very easily, it may be that few if any other animals are capable of fully grasping t…Read more