Millikan's theory.

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Representations are for Millikan part of a larger group of entities for which she considers there is no generic name in English, and which would include “[n]atural signs, animals’ signs, people’s signs, indexes, signals, indicators, symbols, representations, sentences, maps, charts, pictures” [LTOBC, 85]. For want of a better term, Millikan calls these entities signs, and claims that what is common to all signs is their being, to a greater or lesser degree, intentional. That is, what all signs have in common, in a family resemblance way, is their bearing a certain relationship to entities other than themselves – a relationship which is usually characterized as “being about something else”, “meaning something else”. In what follows, I will consider what the nature of this “being about something else” is according to Millikan. I will pay particular attention to mental, or inner, representations, despite the fact that Millikan believes “articulate conventional signs” – that is, I take it, verbal utterances – to be the paradigm case of signs. For, like Searle, Millikan regards verbal utterances and other external verbal-like modes of representation (such as writing), to have an intentionality derived from the original intentionality of states of mind, and thus explainable in terms of the latter.

Intentionality is, according to Millikan, a question of degree: indeed, she rejects Brentano’s original motivation for reintroducing the term, which was to establish a criterion for the mental, thus creating “a clean gap” between the mental and the physical. But intentionality, claims Millikan, is not a clean-cut phenomenon: there is no clear distinction between the intentional and the nonintentional (between, say, a word’s meaning something and a storm cloud’s indicating rain) – just as, in her naturalistic conception, there is no discontinuity between the human mind and the rest of the physical (and biological) universe. Intentionality has for Millikan two aspects: one of them has to do, “very generally, with what is Normal or proper”; the other one is related to mapping relations. Examining these two aspects in detail will enable us to better grasp Millikan’s theory of representation.

NORMAL/PROPER FUNCTIONS

Millikan’s notion of Normal and proper functions lies at the root of her conception of  representation. The capitalization of “Normal” here is meant to distinguish the concept from causal or dispositional senses of the term – for indeed, Millikan’s concept of proper or Normal functions is a normative one. The Normal function of a given item specifies what that item should do in terms of its evolutionary history, what it has been evolutively designed to do (which may or may not be what it actually does), not the events it causes or tends to cause. Proper functions are characterized by their normative character, not by their causal power or dispositional relations, and this for three reasons:

  1. An item can do (and in fact usually does) many things that are not their proper function: for instance, the heart’s proper function is to pump blood, but it also makes a rhythmic noise. The heartbeat, however, is not the heart’s Normal function, as it has not been evolutively designed to make such a noise, but to serve as a pump for the blood circulation.

  1. An entity can have a proper function which is never, or hardly ever, performed: Millikan’s own example is that of the tail of the spermatozoon is to propel the sperm cell into the ovum. However, this is rarely accomplished, as the vast majority of spermatozoa fail to reach their aim.

  1. An entity can be faulty and not perform its proper function adequately, or not at all. A diseased heart may not pump blood adequately, and a spermatozoon’s tail may be defective and unable to propel the sperm cell. However, it seems undeniable that the proper function the heart remains the pumping of blood and that of the spermatozoon’s tail the propelling of the sperm cell.
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Proper functions are thus eminently relational in that they make possible the interaction between the biological item and its environment. They are also historical (in the evolutionary sense of the term). In her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (henceforth LTOBC), as well as in her introduction to White Queen Psychology, Millikan further characterizes proper functions F according to two conditions. Given a proper or Normal function F and a biological item B,

  1. A is a reproduction of some prior item that, because of the possession of certain reproduced properties, actually performed F in the past, and A exists ...

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