Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Millikan

Ruth Garrett Millikan’s work in philosophy of mind and language develops a biological account of representation. Rather than beginning with an interpreter who assigns meanings to otherwise meaningless signs, she asks how a system’s history and organization can establish what its signals are supposed to indicate. Her version of teleosemantics, often called biosemantics, gives particular importance to the mechanisms that use representations.

Major Works and Development

Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1984) develops the framework of proper functions, intentional signs, and biological explanation. “Biosemantics” (1989) presents the account of representational content in a shorter form. White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (1993) extends the framework across questions about thought and psychology. On Clear and Confused Ideas (2000) applies it to concepts; Beyond Concepts (2017) develops the distinction between linguistic concepts and the individual cognitive capacities Millikan calls unicepts.

Proper Functions

A proper function is not simply an effect a mechanism regularly produces. A heart pumps blood and makes noise, but the contribution to circulation explains why hearts of that kind were reproduced. Making noise does not. Millikan’s account appeals to historically established families and the effects that explain the reproduction of their members.

This approach supplies a distinction between functioning and malfunctioning: a defective heart retains its function even when it cannot perform it. Proper functions may also be derived from the functions of mechanisms that produce or design something. Consequently, the framework does not restrict functions to traits directly selected by genetic evolution. Learning, reproduction of behavior, and cultural transmission require their own historical explanations, rather than the assumption that whatever currently proves useful already has a proper function.

Producer–Consumer Organization

A signal’s content depends on the organization linking its producer to its consumer. The consumer is a mechanism that uses the signal to perform a function. What matters especially is the correspondence between signal and world that helps explain how the consumer historically succeeded.

For example, a bee’s dance varies with the location of a food source. Other bees use that variation to travel to the source. The dance’s representational role is explained through a systematic mapping between its variations and locations, together with the functions of the mechanisms that produce and use it. Mere correlation with a location would not supply the whole account.

Millikan’s Normal conditions are conditions in a historical explanation of successful functioning, not necessarily the statistically most common conditions. A correspondence can be Normal even when successful performance is infrequent. This qualification also prevents the theory from equating truth with success on every individual occasion: a false signal may accidentally lead to a useful result, while a true signal may fail because another part of the system malfunctions.

Misrepresentation and Action

Biosemantics aims to explain how a representation can be false without relying on an interpreter’s judgment. A signal can occur when the relevant world condition is absent, even though the consumer still responds as its organization disposes it to respond. Its present cause and its content therefore need not coincide.

Frog prey detection illustrates both the proposal and a difficulty. A mechanism may respond to small moving dark shapes, including inedible objects. Which feature fixes its content: flies, edible prey, or some broader condition relevant to feeding? Consumer function helps constrain the answer, but a history of successful feeding does not automatically distinguish every candidate description.

Millikan also develops pushmi-pullyu representations, which combine descriptive and directive functions. A bee’s dance does not merely indicate where food is; it also guides where the receiving bees should go. Such cases challenge the assumption that representation must always divide neatly into belief-like description and desire-like instruction.

Objections and Replies

Content indeterminacy. Critics ask whether selection history fixes sufficiently precise contents when several correlated features contributed to success. Millikan appeals to systematic mapping relations and detailed Normal explanations of consumer functioning, rather than fitness considered in isolation. Whether these resources uniquely determine sophisticated contents remains disputed.

History and duplicates. A spontaneously produced duplicate with no relevant history—the “Swampman” case—appears capable of thought, yet historical theories may initially deny it the same content as an ordinary person. Defenders distinguish present behavioral similarity from possession of historically constituted functions; critics question whether that distinction should govern mental attribution.

Scope. Explaining animal signals is not yet explaining mathematical thought, novel concepts, or the full flexibility of human language. Millikan extends the account through learning, language, and patterns of recognition. The adequacy of those extensions is a separate question from whether simple biological representations receive a plausible explanation.

Biosemantics primarily addresses content and misrepresentation. It does not, by itself, identify which content-bearing systems understand their representations or have conscious experience.

Further Reading

  • Millikan, Ruth Garrett. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism. MIT Press, 1984.
  • Millikan, Ruth Garrett. “Biosemantics.” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 6 (1989): 281–297.
  • Millikan, Ruth Garrett. White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. MIT Press, 1993.
  • Schulte, Peter, and Karen Neander. “Teleological Theories of Mental Content.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  • Teleosemantics — theories connecting content with biological function.
  • Reference — how representations concern particular things or kinds.
  • Intentionality — aboutness, accuracy, and misrepresentation.
  • Semantic Externalism — historical and environmental contributions to content.
  • Dretske — a different function-based approach to naturalizing content.