Ruth Millikan

Ruth Millikan is an influential American philosopher renowned for her groundbreaking work in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of biology. Her career, primarily at the University of Connecticut, has been defined by developing a naturalistic, evolution-based framework for understanding meaning, representation, and intentionality. Millikan's most celebrated contribution is her "theory of proper functions," which provides a teleological account of how mental states and linguistic symbols acquire their content through their evolutionary history and stabilizing functions.

Biography and academic career

Ruth Garrett Millikan was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and completed her undergraduate studies at Oberlin College. She earned her doctorate in philosophy from Yale University in 1969 under the supervision of Wilfrid Sellars and Ruth Barcan Marcus. After teaching briefly at the University of Michigan and University of Western Ontario, she joined the University of Connecticut faculty in 1975, where she spent the majority of her career and is now a professor emerita. Her intellectual development was significantly shaped by the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V.O. Quine, leading her to challenge prevailing analytic philosophy approaches with insights from evolutionary biology and ethology.

Philosophical work and contributions

Millikan's philosophical project is a comprehensive attempt to naturalize intentionality and meaning by grounding them in the biological sciences. She argues against Cartesianism and many forms of functionalism, proposing instead that the content of mental states and language is determined by their proper functions, which are derived from a history of natural selection or learning. Her work spans critical analyses of concepts, perception, and language acquisition, consistently applying her teleological framework. Key elements of her system include the distinction between "pushmi-pullyu" representations and more detached representations, and the development of "biosemantics," a theory explaining how biological devices come to represent states of the world.

Theory of proper functions

The cornerstone of Millikan's philosophy is her theory of proper functions, detailed in her seminal 1984 work, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. A proper function is what a trait or mechanism is *supposed* to do, based not on its current capacities or a designer's intent, but on its evolutionary history of having contributed to the survival and reproduction of its ancestors. For example, the proper function of a heart is to pump blood because ancestors with hearts that pumped blood were selected for. She extends this analysis to mental representations and linguistic symbols, arguing that their content is fixed by the historically normal conditions under which they performed their proper functions of guiding behavior successfully. This approach provides a solution to the problem of misrepresentation and grounds semantics in objective, historical facts.

Influence and legacy

Millikan's work has profoundly influenced contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and theoretical biology. Her naturalistic teleology has been engaged with and developed by prominent philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, and Karen Neander. The theory of proper functions is a central pillar in the debate on teleosemantics and has provided a robust framework for discussions in the philosophy of psychology and evolutionary epistemology. Her receipt of the prestigious Jean Nicod Prize in 2002 and her invited delivery of the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2017 underscore her significant standing within the global philosophical community.

Selected bibliography

* Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (1984) * White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (1993) * On Clear and Confused Ideas (2000) * Varieties of Meaning (2004) * Beyond Concepts (2017)

Category:American philosophers Category:1933 births Category:Living people Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Philosophers of language Category:Yale University alumni Category:University of Connecticut faculty