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AfterwordIn Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and her critics, Wiley. 2013.
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4On Meaning, Meaning and MeaningIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 85-106. 2012.
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5Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein ParadoxIn Alexander Miller & Crispin Wright (eds.), Rule-Following and Meaning, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 209-233. 2002.
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305What has Natural Information to Do with Intentional Representation?In D. Walsh (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 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." (Jerry Fodor, The Elm and the Expert, p.32)
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72Ruth Garrett Millikan, Review of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature by Peter Godfrey-Smith (review)Philosophy of Science 65 (2): 375-377. 1998.
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68INTERVIEW: Gedacht wird in der Welt, nicht im KopfDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 58 (6): 981-1000. 2010.This interview deals with the major themes in the work of Ruth Millikan. Her most fundamental idea is that the intentionality of inner and outer representations can be understood in analogy to biological functions. Another innovative feature is the view that thought and language stand parallel to each other. Thirdly, the basic ideas concerning the ontology and the epistemology of concepts are explained. Millikan aims at clarifying her position by contrasting it with Dretske, Fodor, Sellars, and …Read more
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330Compare and contrast Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan on teleosemanticsPhilosophical Topics 18 (2): 151-61. 1990.
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32An evolutionist approach to languagePhilosophy Research Archives 5 286-319. 1979.I argue that looking for functions that explain the survival value of various language forms taken with their characteristic cooperative hearer responses, while looking also for functions that explain the survival value of the mental or neural equipments that learn to produce and to react to these language forms, is a reasonable and promising approach to the study of language and the philosophy of mind. The approach promises to help to unify the philosophy of language, showing clearly how the se…Read more
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170An Input Condition for Teleosemantics? Reply to Shea (and Godfrey-Smith)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 436-455. 2007.In his essay "Consumers Need Information: Supplementing Teleosemantics with an Input Condition" (this issue) Nicholas Shea argues, with support from the work of Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996), that teleosemantics, as David Papinau and I have articulated it, cannot explain why "content attribution can be used to explain successful behavior." This failure is said to result from defining the intentional contents of representations by reference merely to historically normal conditions for success of the…Read more
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136Teleosemantics and the frogsMind and Language 39 (1): 52-60. 2024.Some have thought that the plausibility of teleosemantics requires that it yield a determinate answer to the question of what the semantic “content” is of the “representation” triggered in the optic nerve of a frog that spots a fly. An outsize literature has resulted in which, unfortunately, a number of serious confusions and omissions that concern the way teleosemantics would have to work have appeared and been passed on uncorrected leaving a distorted and simplistic picture of the teleosemanti…Read more
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13Comment on Artiga’s “Teleosemantics and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations”Erkenntnis 88 (1): 409-417. 2021.“Teleosemantics and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations” (call it “TP-PR,” this journal 2014 79.3, 545–566) argues that core teleosemantics, particularly as defined in Millikan (Language, thought and other biological categories, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984, J Philos 86(6):281–297, 1989, White queen psychology and other essays for Alice, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, Philosophical perspectives, Ridgeview Publishing, Alascadero, 1996, Varieties of meaning, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004–2008), seems to imply t…Read more
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70Self‐signs and intensional contextsMind and Language 38 (4): 962-980. 2022.Paradigm intensional contexts result from the unmarked use of referential expressions as “self‐signs”, signs that refer to themselves as tokens, types, or members of Sellarsian “dot‐quoted” kinds. Self‐signing (but unquoted) linguistic expressions are more difficult to recognize than non‐linguistic self‐signs such as the color of a felt pen's casing that represents the color of ink inside. I will discuss non‐linguistic self‐signing, then examine self‐signing in quotation, in “said that …” contex…Read more
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61Comment on the Relation between Representation and InformationBiosemiotics 14 (3): 581-582. 2021.Deacon’s target article is a welcome contribution not only on “biological information” but, more generally, on representation in cognitive science. Some kind of explanation and justification for use of the terms “representation” and “interpretant” for primordial autogen system would be helpful. A connection between the notions of “information” and “representation” can be elaborated more in this respect.
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Biofunctions: Two ParadigmsIn Andre Ariew, Robert Cummins & Mark Perlman (eds.), Functions: New Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Clarendon Press. 2002.
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BiosemanticsIn Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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79Comment on Artiga’s “Teleosemantics and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations”Erkenntnis 88 (1): 1-9. 2021.“Teleosemantics and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations” (call it “TP-PR,” this journal 2014 79.3, 545–566) argues that core teleosemantics, particularly as defined in Millikan (Language, thought and other biological categories, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1984, J Philos 86(6):281–297, 1989, White queen psychology and other essays for Alice, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, Philosophical perspectives, Ridgeview Publishing, Alascadero, 1996, Varieties of meaning, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004–2008), seems to imply t…Read more
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191Neuroscience and teleosemanticsSynthese 199 (1-2): 2457-2465. 2020.Correctly understood, teleosemantics is the claim that “representation” is a function term. Things are called “representations” if they have a certain kind of function or telos and perform it in a certain kind of way. This claim is supported with a discussion and proposals about the function of a representation and of how representations perform that function. These proposals have been retrieved by putting together current descriptions from the literature on neural representations with earlier e…Read more
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163Biosemantics and Words that Don't RepresentTheoria 84 (3): 229-241. 2018.One of the virtues of the biosemantic view of language is the clarity and simplicity of its description of the general nature of nonrepresentational linguistic constructions. It doesn't follow, however, that it is obvious on this view how these functions should be described individually. After an explanation of the biosemantic approach, initial suggestions are made for analyses of a variety of nonrepresentational constructions that have traditionally been considered problematic. Included are “no…Read more
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43Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural InformationOxford University Press. 2017.Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.
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1Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod LecturesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3): 674-681. 2007.
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148Naturalizing IntentionalityThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 83-90. 2000.“Intentionality,” as introduced to modern philosophy by Brentano, denotes the property that distinguishes the mental from all other things. As such, intentionality has been related to purposiveness. I suggest, however, that there are many kinds of purposes that are not mental nor derived from anything mental, such as the purpose of one’s stomach to digest food or the purpose of one’s protective eye blink reflex to keep out the sand. These purposes help us to understand intentionality in a natura…Read more
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9Language: A Biological ModelClarendon Press. 2005.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 …Read more
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292Images of identity: In search of modes of presentationMind 106 (423): 499-519. 1997.There are many alternative ways that a mind or brain might represent that two of its representations were of the same object or property, the 'Strawson' model, the 'duplicates' model, the 'synchrony' mode, the 'Christmas lights' model, the 'anaphor' model, and so forth. I first discuss what would constitute that a mind or brain was using one of these systems of identity marking rather than another. I then discuss devastating effects that adopting the Strawson model has on the notion that there a…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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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
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |