Ruth Millikan

Last updated

Ruth Millikan
Born1933
Philadelphia
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Main interests
Philosophy of biology, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of language
Notable ideas
Biosemantics
Influences

Ruth Garrett Millikan (born 1933) is a leading American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. Millikan has spent most of her career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now Professor Emerita of Philosophy.

Contents

Education and career

Millikan earned her BA from Oberlin College in 1955. At Yale University she studied under Wilfrid Sellars. Although W. Sellars left for the University of Pittsburgh midway through Millikan's doctorate, she stayed at Yale and earned her PhD in 1969. She and Paul Churchland are often considered leading proponents of "right wing" (i.e., who emphasize Sellars’s scientific realism) Sellarsianism.

Millikan taught half-time at Berea College from 1969–1972, Two-thirds time at Western Michigan University from 1972–1973, half-time at the University of Michigan from 1993–1996, [1] but otherwise spent her entire career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now professor emerita. She is married to American psychologist and cognitive scientist Donald Shankweiler. [1]

She was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris in 2002. [2] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. [3] In 2017, she received both the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh [4] and the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. [5]

Philosophical work

Millikan is most famous for the view which, in her 1989 paper of the same name, she refers to as "biosemantics". [6] Biosemantics is a theory about something philosophers often refer to as "intentionality". Intentionality is the phenomenon of things being 'about' other things, paradigm cases being thoughts and sentences. A belief of mine that you will do my chores for me, for example, is about you and about my chores. The same is true of a corresponding desire, intention or spoken or written command.

In general, the goal of a theory of intentionality is to explain the phenomenon – things being 'about' other things – in other, more informative, terms. Such a theory aims to give an account of what this 'aboutness' consists in. Just as chemistry offers the claim "Water is H2O" as a theory of what water consists in, so biosemantics aims for a constitutive account of intentionality. Such an account, Millikan stresses, must deal adequately with such hallmarks of mentality as error, confusion, and what looks like standing in a relation (the 'aboutness' relation) to something that doesn't exist. For example: one 'sees' the stick is bent, but realizes otherwise after pulling it from the water; the inexperienced prospector thinks he's struck it rich, but he's holding a lump of pyrite ("fool's gold"); the field marshal thinks about the next day's battle, the child wants to ride a unicorn, and the phrase "the greatest prime" is somehow 'about' a number that cannot possibly exist (there's a simple proof for this).

As the name hints, Millikan's theory explains intentionality in terms that are broadly 'biological' or teleological. Specifically, she explains intentionality using the explanatory resources of natural selection: what thoughts and sentences and desires are 'about' is ultimately elucidated by reference to what has been selected and what it has been selected for (i.e., what advantage it conferred on ancestors who possessed it). Where this selection is non-intentional, then what it is for is its 'proper function'. [7]

Equally important is what might be called the co-evolution of producer-mechanisms and consumer-mechanisms. Millikan refers to the intertwined selection histories of these mechanisms to explain the hallmarks of mentality and to offer a wide range of positions on various matters of dispute in the philosophy of mind and language.

In her article "Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge", Millikan defends the position that the justification of true beliefs through an explanation in accordance with evolution constitutes knowledge.

Publications

Books

Note: the 1993, 2005 and 2012 books are collections of papers.

Other works

Millikan has also published many articles, many of which are listed and available here.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Searle</span> American philosopher

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.

Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic mark of the mental by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of intentional inexistence: to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wilfrid Sellars</span> American philosopher

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliminative materialism</span> Philosophical view that some states of mind, as commonly understood, do not exist

Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Fodor</span> American philosopher (1935–2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Rescher</span> American philosopher

Nicholas Rescher is a German-American philosopher, polymath, and author, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961. He is chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and was formerly chairman of the philosophy department.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ray Jackendoff</span> American linguist and philosophy professor

Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Brandom</span> American philosopher

Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use, thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman has taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.

Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Perry (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

John Richard Perry is a professor at Stanford University and University of California, Riverside. He has made significant contributions to philosophy in the fields of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is known primarily for his work on situation semantics, reflexivity, indexicality, personal identity, and self-knowledge.

Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of language</span> Discipline of philosophy that deals with language and meaning

In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uta Frith</span> German developmental psychologist, born 1941

Dame Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She has pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. She has written several books on these subjects, arguing for autism to be seen as a mental condition rather than as one caused by parenting. Her Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduces the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. She also pioneered the work on child dyslexia. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.

According to Franz Brentano, intentionality refers to the "aboutness of mental states that cannot be a physical relation between a mental state and what it is about because in a physical relation each of the relata must exist whereas the objects of mental states might not."

Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (2020–2023).

Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).

Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception.

2017 in philosophy

References

  1. 1 2 Millikan CV uconn.edu
  2. "Archives - INSTITUT JEAN NICOD".
  3. "American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2014 fellows" (PDF). Retrieved July 14, 2023.
  4. "Rescher Prize".
  5. "Logic and Philosophy - RSP". Archived from the original on March 16, 2017.
  6. Biosemantics Oxford Handbook
  7. Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Language: A Biological Model, Oxford, 2005, 228pp, $29.95 (pbk), ISBN   0199284776.