A proper understanding of Millikan

Abstract

Ruth Millikan's teleological theory of mental content is complex and often misunderstood. This paper motivates and clarifies some of the complexities of the theory, and shows that paying careful attention to its details yields answers to a number of common objections to teleological theories, in particular, the problem of novel mental states, the problem of functionally false beliefs, and problems about indeterminacy or multiplicity of function.

Response to Neander's Critics

“…Even if Neander's preferred solution in terms of analog representations doesn't actually work for color (as she suspected – see p. 201), there are other solutions that might work. Millikan's preferred solution is in terms of direct and derived proper functions (see Kingsbury 2006 for a lucid overview of how this distinction can be used to understand novel contents). Garson and Papineau (2019) recently develop the idea that we can explain novel contents by appealing to the workings of ontogenetic selection processes.…”

Teleosemantics: Etiological Foundations

“…Productivity arises from the fact that even very simple signs are always articulated into variant and invariant parts and that this articulation – of which compositionality in natural language is one instance – is exploitable in systematic fashion (cf. Kingsbury 2006). Millikan writes: “Isomorphisms can be defined by functions [mathematical sense] that are as bizarre, as grue‐like, as you please … Every representation is in some kind of code.…”

“…Other etiological theories includeWright (1973),Neander (1991Neander ( , 1995,Griffiths (1993),Godfrey-Smith (1993, 1994,Allen and Bekoff (1995),Buller (1998),Price (1998, 2001), and Ryder (2004, 2006. 2 A separate debate is whether one of them better captures the notion of function of use to biologists(Amundsen and Lauder 1994) or cognitive science(Cummins 1989.3 The term ''proper function'' is Millikan's coinage.…”