BOOK REVIEW

Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language: A Biological Model

Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, vii+228, £18.99, ISBN 978-0-19-928477-1

William Cameron

Published online: 17 January 2008

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

In her book of 1984 (Millikan 1984), Professor Millikan described the terms used in

human linguistic practices as devices with application explicable in the same

historically emergent functional terms as kidneys, hearts, screwdrivers and bee

dances. For her, ‘function’ is a technical term, carrying connotations of a

determinate history of replication of some device that has emerged in order to do a

job, and all of the attributes of language such as meaning, mood and force may be

analysed in these terms.

Since then, Millikan has extended her natural and historical approach to a notion

of ‘natural convention’ which, although it considers phenomena similar to those

analysed by Lewis (1969, 1975), differs from this in many ways, and in her Jean

Nicod lectures, (Millikan 2004), she defended a notion of ‘purpose’ that closely

parallels her notion of function. In addition, she has broken new ground in her

studies of substances and substance concepts (Millikan 2000).

The volume under review comprises eight of Millikan’s recent essays concerned

with the roles of function, convention, meaning and purpose in the explanation of

natural public language, and two that are new. In her preface (p. vi) she claims that

‘‘This volume presents a different way of viewing the partial regularities that

language displays, the way they express norms and conventions.’’ For a reader new

to her work this may be true but although all of this work is vigorous and

provocative, most of the arguments are to be found within her previous publications.

Since each chapter is independent, I shall consider each separately. Millikan is a

teleologist, for her functions are real. I am not a teleologist so for me some, but by

no means all, of this work is controversial. Where I am puzzled by or disagree with

her argument I will say so.

In the first chapter, Millikan considers Lewis’ analyses of convention in linguistic

practice and introduces her own notion of ’natural convention’. Millikan’s concern,

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Minds & Machines (2008) 18:127–131

DOI 10.1007/s11023-008-9088-4

as always, is with history; a natural convention is a pattern of behaviour that has

naturally emerged by reproduction and weight of precedent. Although speaker

purpose and linguistic function generally follow linguistic conventions, many

exceptions occur in linguistic practice. Purposes of speakers may or may not be met

within any given convention and are not always coordinative. For me her usage of

‘purpose’ is ambiguous and I will return to this issue later.

The second chapter is more controversial. Millikan’s target is Chomsky’s

rejection of the notion of a public language. She argues cogently that language

needs conventions and that public conventionality is essential to human language.

However, for her, ‘‘a pivotal job of the language faculty is to make language

conventions possible and the functions of language conventions are communicative

functions.’’ (p. 27) This is puzzling, for if one takes public language to be the total

system of oral and written communication between humans, then this system would

include all linguistic terms, the conventions that constrain their use, and the

cognitive architecture of the humans involved. All of these items have function,

both in the Millikan sense of what they are there to do and the Cummins (1975)

sense of which capacities they enable, but this does not imply that the function of

those aspects of human cognitive architecture that Hauser et al. (2002) call the

language faculty is to support linguistic conventions. One may argue, as Millikan

does, that a function of language is to communicate and that a necessary condition

for communication is the existence of coordinative conventions. Such conventions

have naturally emerged with human linguistic practices, and the evolution of the

neural and anatomical changes, which have enabled the human capacities that

comprise ‘the language faculty’. Millikan’s object in this chapter is to reconcile

Chomsky’s denial of a ‘common public language’ with her thesis that human

communication is supported by coordinative conventions. These are readily

reconciled but not, I think, by this argument.

In the third chapter, which is new, Millikan distinguishes between three uses of

meaning: as a stabilising function in cooperative convention, as semantic mapping,

and in the identification of substances or doings that have common affordance. All of

this makes eminent sense and may, hopefully, dissolve the issue of whether meaning

is or is not ‘in the head’. However, I found two aspects of Millikan’s argument

regarding the role of conceptions puzzling. She argues (p. 70), ’’The third aspect of

meaning, conception, is not, then, essentially public. It attaches in the first instance to

idiolects rather than public languages.’’ Certainly, each person’s recognition of a

substance is unique to that person and for there to be communication between people

about the world it is necessary that recognitions may be of the same substance.

However, in general usage, the unique nature of an idiolect is more to do with

idiosyncratic structuring of language than the unique nature of recognition. Also

within her discussion of conceptions, (p. 74) Millikan considers the phrase: ‘John

kept insisting that it wasn’t a woodchuck but rather a ground hog’ as an example of

an intensional context, and the phrase ‘John firmly believed that it was not a

woodchuck but a ground hog’ as an example of an intensional attitude context.

Neither of these examples seems quite in the context of her argument since both are

phrases that would occur in the resolution of misunderstanding as different speech

communities meet and mingle and synonyms survive.

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In her fourth chapter, Millikan addresses the distinction between rule and

convention in language and thought, using the work of Sellars and Brandom as a foil

for her argument. She argues that the meaning of a linguistic form depends on its

stabilising function in linguistic practice. Thoughts are not intentional until they

have truth or satisfaction conditions and intentionality requires ‘attitude’, that the

content have relevance for the thinker. Much of this is also under consideration in

the following chapter, to which I turn next.

In Chapter 5, Millikan claims that language and thought can be defined

independently, though public language ‘‘is constitutive of developed human

thought.’’ (p. 92) For her arguments, she relies on her well-developed notion of

function and invokes a notion of intentionality. The former component of this

argument has been well, if repetitiously, described, while the latter is more

contentious. Here, as in the previous chapter, Millikan defines intentionality as to do

with truth, or satisfaction, conditions. In Millikan (1984, pp. 5, 10), she followed an

older usage and defined intentionality as aboutness, though in later writing she takes

a more teleological approach. In the older usage, the property of intentionality

emerged with life since only the living thing has states that are about other things for

it: for the living agent, aboutness and forness go hand in hand. Function, what a

device does for the agent, then emerges as a notion derived from the forness of

intentionality. However, this argument is in opposition to Millikan’s insistence that

function inheres in what an item is there ‘to do’ rather than what or whom, it is there

‘for’.

I found Millikan’s account of thought in this chapter particularly interesting.

Although she claims in her opening paragraphs that public language is constitutive of

developed human thought, she has here developed an account of thought as an

emergent cognitive function, dependent on the recognitional capacities that she

described in her text on substances and substance concepts (Millikan 2000). She

writes, ‘‘Surprisingly, by this route enters language’’, and surprisingly, for this

reviewer, she ends with the thought, ‘‘So which comes first, thought or language?

The relations, if they are as I have outlined them, are very complex indeed.’’ (p. 104)

However, she has demonstrated that thought, defined as conceptual processing,

precedes language and she claims at the outset that public language is constitutive of

developed human thought. What is so complex?

In Chapter 6, the other new piece in this volume, Millikan develops her theme of

concepts as essential components of thought, whether or not articulated, and

distinguishes between ‘classes’ that are characterised by the members having certain

common properties (p. 107), and her notion, set out in Millikan (2000), of substances.

Substances are ‘kinds’, historical, eternal or individual, and it is these that are

recognised by people and give rise to concepts. This is an important point; although

psychologists have demonstrated that many creatures have the ability to distinguish

classes, only certain creatures have the cognitive capacities to distinguish kinds and

have thoughts about their occurrence.

In Chapter 7, ‘‘Cutting Philosophy of Language Down to Size’’, Millikan’s attack

is on two strong assumptions about the nature of language that she claims are

inherent in the methodology of conceptual analysis. Firstly, that the referent of an

act of reference has its source in the mind and secondly, that a univocal term, or

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concept, is associated with a single conception, common to all who understand it.

Curiously, Millikan is prepared to accept the first assumption rephrased in a

distinction between the psychological purpose of the thought, that the thinker

intends that referent, and the biological purpose of the thought, that the function of

this form is to pick out that referent. (p. 131) Only in the latter phraseology does she

find the assumption defensible. Surely, in her usage of ‘purpose’ as in Millikan

(2004), these are two sides of the same coin. Her arguments against the second

assumption essentially repeat those of the previous two chapters and derive from

Millikan (2000).

Chapter 8 is devoted to the application of Millikan’s notions of proper function

and convention to the theory of speech acts and offers some new insights into the

illocutionary-perlocutionary distinction. She distinguishes between three aspects of

speech acts: the speaker’s purpose in speaking, the purpose (function) of the term

used, and the conventional purpose of an extralinguistic move. Again, we have the

duality of usage of ‘purpose’. If a person wishes someone to look at some thing

whilst she speaks, she may point. The pointing is an extra linguistic move and is

conventional and the terms used have function, but that person’s purposes in

speaking and pointing pertain to her as an autonomous agent, acting in a contingent

context. I will return to this issue in my comments on the final chapter.

One problem with attributing proper function to linguistic items is that some

items serve distinct functions in the same context and Chapter 9 is devoted to

meeting this challenge. Millikan defines ‘pushmi-pullu’ representations, PPRs, as

those that are both directive and descriptive. One example is that ‘‘a chair’s

statement that a meeting is adjourned both terminates a meeting and advises

members of this termination’’. Millikan suggests that such representations are

particularly primitive since much animal communication serves the two functions of

conveying information and inducing action. Some support for this suggestion comes

from work on higher animals (see Dupre 1992), but surely Millikan goes too far in

attributing this dual aspect to chicken calls and bee dances. Millikan also considers

whether thick concepts are examples of PPRs. However, thick concepts present a

particular problem for the Millikan notion of linguistic proper function, since the

descriptive function of such terms is dependent on both the linguistic community

and the aesthetic, or moral, community in which they are used.

In her final chapter Millikan examines the distinction between semantics and

pragmatics and describes some of the rich mix of function and meaning that arises

in the linguistic practices of human communities. This chapter is entitled

‘‘Semantics/Pragmatics: Purposes and Cross-Purposes’’ and the ambiguity of usage

of ‘purpose’ is brought into high relief. In previous work, in particular Millikan

(2004), and in this chapter, Millikan claims that purposes derived from natural

selection are not of a fundamentally different kind from human purposes and in

many of her examples, she attributes purpose both to linguistic forms and instinctive

human behaviour. She opens her argument for a dynamic blurring between

semantics and pragmatics with the sentence: ‘‘If stabilizing function and

speaker purpose for a linguistic form conflict often enough the result will be

either a change in function or the addition of a new function.’’ (p. 192) I agree, similar

circumstances will correlate with similar purposes and the conventions of linguistic

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practice will adapt accordingly. However, each instance will be an act of an

autonomous agent. Much of animal and human behaviour is autonomous in that it is

contingent on a complex experiential history so that attribution is naturally of

purposeful or intentional action rather than instinctive response. Millikan would

argue that a chisel has in its own right the function of cutting wood, and any other

usage is a derived function. I would argue that the chisel has the function of cutting

wood ‘for’ a carpenter, but if a lout uses it to remove screws then it has that function

‘for’ him. However, this dissension is immaterial; what is important is that in both

usages any function is of the tool, either intrinsically from its history or extrinsically

for the user. The only purposes involved are those of the carpenter or the lout.

The final section of this chapter contains much that is interesting. Millikan argues

cogently that much recognition of purpose in language or behaviour may be readily

acquired without a theory of mind. She also describes the essential transparency of

normal denotation; a hearer does not hear linguistic items but perceives the world

described.

Taken as a whole, this volume contains cogent expositions of salient issues and a

person concerned with these issues may find it convenient to have them together on

the bookshelf. However, there is much citation of previous work and a separate

bibliography is included for each chapter. The effect for this reviewer was that the

feeling of repetition distracted from the quality of the argument. Despite this and

despite my disagreement with some of the teleology, I enjoyed the read. I found

much to applaud and much incitement to argument.

References

Cummins, R. (1975). Functional analysis. Journal of Philosophy, 72, 741–764.

Dupre, J. (1992). The mental lives of nonhuman animals. In M. Bekoff & D. Jamieson (Eds.), Readings inanimal cognition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.

Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and

how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1580.

Lewis, D. K. (1969). Convention: A philosophical study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lewis, D. K. (1975). Languages and language. In K. Gunderson (Eds.), Language, mind and knowledge.

Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Millikan, R. G. (2000). On clear and confused ideas. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Millikan, R. G. (2004). Varieties of meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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