Präsenzveranstaltung

Menschliche und nicht-menschliche Kognition:

Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Philosophie Ruth Millikans

Ziele

• Verständnis von Grundfragen der Philosophie des Geistes und der Sprache

• Einordnung der Philosophie Ruth Millikans in die Geschichte der Philosophie des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts

• Entwicklung der Kompetenz, aktuelle Texte der Philosophie des Geistes zu analysieren und mit eigenen Annahmen zu kontrastieren

Die Unterscheidung menschlicher und nicht-menschlicher Kognition ist als Frage nach der anthropologischen Differenz (Was unterscheidet den Menschen von anderen Tieren?) ein Grundthema der Philosophie, aber auch zahlreicher ideologischer Einlassungen zur unterstellten Sonderstellung des Menschen. In der jüngeren Philosophie des Geistes spielt die Denkerin Ruth Millikan hier eine besondere Rolle, weshalb das Seminar vor allem einer ihrer eingängigsten Monographien gewidmet ist. Und zwar:

Ruth Millikan, Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures. MIT Press 2004.

Dieses Buch bildet die Textgrundlage unseres Seminars. Eine deutsche Übersetzung ist ebenfalls erhältlich: Die Vielfalt der Bedeutung: Zeichen, Ziele und ihre Verwandtschaft. Übersetzt von Hajo Greif. Suhrkamp 2008.

Zwar werden wir im Seminar ausgewählte Kapitel besonders behandeln, doch empfiehlt es sich, den gesamten Text möglichst im Original gelesen zu haben.

Ansatz

Der Kurs wird im Seminarstil abgehalten und sollte ausreichend Raum für Diskussionen bieten. Ich erwarte nicht, dass Sie bereits über irgendwelche Fähigkeiten verfügen, aber Sie sollten lernen, ein Verständnis des Texts entlang der folgenden Punkte aufzubauen und zu artikulieren: Was sagt der Text? Was sind Argumente oder entscheidende Begriffe? Was sagt er nicht? Was sind stillschweigende Annahmen? Warum könnten Dinge gesagt werden? Können sie in andere Ideen und Kontexte übersetzt werden? Wenn nicht, warum nicht?

Denken Sie nicht, dass Diskussionen eine Ablenkung vom Lernen sind. Diskussionen sollten Ihnen helfen, akademische Gewandtheit im Umgang mit Ideen, Fragen, Argumenten und Terminologie zu erlangen. Die meisten Dinge, die ich Ihnen erzähle, können Sie woanders lesen. Was Sie woanders nicht tun können, ist, sie durch Gespräche lebendig werden zu lassen. Der Text, den wir diskutieren, ist noch nicht so alt. Trotz dieser Tatsache haben Sie diesen Text vermutlich nie gesehen. Diese Konfrontation macht die Sache interessant! Während unseres Seminars sollten Sie lernen, sich den Stoff, den ich unterrichte, anzueignen und ihn sich auch dadurch zu eigen zu machen, dass Sie ihn mit Ihren eigenen Ansichten und Interessen vermischen. In diesem Sinne hoffe ich auch, von Ihnen zu lernen. Der genaue Plan ist noch ziemlich offen, da ich mir gerne ein Bild von Ihren Interessen und Spezialgebieten machen möchte, bevor ich ihn fertigstelle. In jedem Fall sollten Sie Folgendes tun:

1. Lesen Sie die zugewiesenen Passagen immer vor dem Seminar. Das betrifft hier nun vor allem die unten genannte Textgrundlage. Warum? Einfach, weil ich sie voraussetze, und wenn Sie sie nicht gelesen haben, werden Sie keine Ahnung haben, worum es in der Diskussion geht.

2. Bereiten Sie immer mindestens eine Frage zum Text schriftlich vor. In meinem Artikel über Fragen finden Sie Einzelheiten dazu, wie man eine Frage strukturiert:

https://handlingideas.blog/2023/03/09/how-can-you-ask-and-structure-questions/

Reichen Sie sie die Frage nicht ein, sondern versuchen Sie, sie im Kurs bei mir oder einem Kommilitonen zur Sprache zu bringen. Formulieren Sie Ihre Frage also schriftlich und strukturieren Sie diese wie folgt:

• Ziel/Thema: sagen Sie, worum es in der Frage geht

• Frage: formulieren Sie die eigentliche Frage

• Voraussetzung/Motivation: geben Sie eine kurze Erklärung, warum die Frage aufkommt

• geben Sie ggf. einen kurzen Vorgriff auf mögliche Antworten (bei Diskussionen ist dies hilfreich, um Folgefragen vorzubereiten)

3. Führen Sie ein Notizbuch für Ihre Fragen und Erkenntnisse, um Ihren Fortschritt und Ihre Ideen im Auge zu behalten.

Im Folgenden finden Sie mein einführendes Script von 2017, das Sie bei der Lektüre und Vorbereitung etwas leiten kann:

Ruth Millikan on Intentionality

Born in 1933, Ruth Millikan is one of the most important philosophers of mind, language and biology. Though often misunderstood, her most influential book is her Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (1984), in which she provides a naturalized account of intentionality by arguing that thought etc. has to be understood in terms of its evolutionary history. This might sound straightforward, but in setting out her argument and her uncompromising externalism she challenges not only a number of colleagues but many doctrines of traditional philosophy. At the same time, Millikan clearly builds on the work of her peers and thus draws on crucial positions in early and later analytic philosophy. She currently works on what (in private conversation) she called her “last book”, which promises a new theory of concepts. (Much of her work can be downloaded from her website: http://philosophy.uconn.edu/faculty/millikan/)

Basics

“We don’t know our mind just by having one.” With this insight Millikan builds on philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Sellars, who vehemently rejected the Cartesian assumption that we understand our mental states by introspection. The reason is that many of our mental states are subconscious and thus not accessible in the first place. Rooted in our biological make-up, many behavioural patterns and mental states take place without our taking notice. Accordingly, Millikan starts out from the fact that humans are animals and tries to explain our capacities in line with those of other animals.

This approach informs her naturalism. Like many other naturalists (such as Fodor or Dretske), she wants her work to be continuous with the natural sciences. Contrary to non-naturalists (such as Brandom or McDowell), naturalists do not explain intentionality from the fact that we already have intentionality (e.g. in our language). That would be considered question-begging. Rather, the idea is to explain mental capacities “bottom up”, from their non-intentional roots. It is this stance that also explains the basic aim she pursues in her Varieties of Meaning (2004): distinguishing between subpersonal or biological purposes and conscious intentions, she tries to persuade us “that no interesting theoretical line can be drawn between these two kinds of purposes. Purposes of the whole person are made up out of intertwined purposes at “lower” or more “biological” levels.” (p. 3) The idea is, then, to explain the intentionality of representations (in perception, thought, language) in human and non-human animals from their natural origins. According to this account, the thought producing mechanisms in animal minds, for instance, have the biological function to yield true beliefs about the environment – just like bee dances have the function to communicate the place of nectar.

A note on the terminology: While the term “semantics” is traditionally reserved for the study of linguistic signs, it is now commonly extended to mental representations. Since Millikan explains such representations by reference to their biological functions, her theory is called “biosemantics” or “teleosemantics”, the latter a compound of “teleology” and “semantics”.

• Consider the question what might distinguish us from other animals!
• Is there one specific property that sets human animals apart?

Approaching the text (ch. 1)

Topic: Varieties of Meaning is a set of lectures setting out and arguing in favour of teleosemantics. The main idea is all kinds of meaning ­– as attributed to natural signs, communicative behaviour, mental representations and linguistic signs – have a lot more in common than meets the eye. Even systems as complex as our human language are derived from natural signs. The common core between animal and human sign systems is that their forms have been selected for, that is: they are around because they have a biological function for the (parts of) organisms that use these signs, be it subconsciously of consciously. The book makes a case, continuous with philosophical, psychological and biological theories, for the evolution of these kinds of meaning. In chapter 1, argues for continuity of subconscious and conscious purposes.

• Naturalism and teleology: a contradiction? Briefly re-consider the methodological restrictions of naturalism in view of the idea of purposes or functions.
  • What notions of teleology do you know (natural, divine, human)?
  • Why could the notion of purpose pose a problem for naturalism?
  • How does Millikan address this problem?

• What does it mean to say that a purpose is “biological”?
  • Conclusion: Is it not possible to “draw a principled line” between certain purposes. (p. 8) Why?
  • Consider the eye blink reflex example and some other examples in the text: distinguish between the purposes.
  • Why are some purposes called “real” in opposition to others?
  • How does the example of “akrasia” fit in? (p. 6)

• How does Millikan explain the selection of explicit human intentions? (p. 8)
  • What does it mean to say that they “represent the conditions of their own fulfillment”?
  • What were they “selected for”? And what precisely was selected? (p. 8, see also p. 68)
  • How does her explanation fare with regard to the fact that intentions often fail (to be fulfilled)?
• What is an affordance? (p. 12)

• Methodology: Why does Millikan stress that she did not engage in “conceptual analysis”? (p. 13)

Teleosemantics and Intentionality

Basics

In discussing intentionality, Millikan distinguishes between two aspects: (1) explaining how something can represent; (2) explaining misrepresentation. Teleosemantics addresses only the question of misrepresentation, representation is explained by a kind of picture theory.

Although “misrepresentation” might sound like a rather special problem, the phenomenon poses indeed one of the most haunting questions in the philosophy of mind. Jerry Fodor (1990) famously introduced the issue under the name of “disjunction problem”. Like Millikan, Fodor is a naturalist; unlike Millikan, Fodor defends a causal theory of mental representation. Traditionally there have been two kinds of explanations of intentionality: similarity and causality. The similarity theory is hopeless, since everything might be similar to anything. Thus, a naturalistic explanation has to make do with a causal theory. (Note that “misrepresentation” is a normative term and should have no place in a naturalistic description of intentionality.) However, in its crude version this theory has it that a representation represents whatever causes the representation. So if a perception of a cat in the shade causes my mind to respond by forming the representation “Dog”, then “Dog” does not only represent dogs, but alsocats in the shade. Because that thing caused the representation “Dog”, too. Thus, someone adhering to the causal theory ought to say that “Dog” means/ represents dogs or cats in the shade, i.e. a disjunction of the two kinds. In other words, within a causal theory you cannot even say that a misrepresentation occurred.

To address the problem of misrepresentation, Millikan takes recourse to her teleosemantic theory. A representation is false if it does not represent in accordance wit its evolutionary function. Our belief-producing mechanisms have been evolutionary designed to produce true beliefs. If they produce false beliefs, they deviate from what its ancestors have done and been selected for. Thus, we can say that a belief is false without recurring to a normative notion of error. Chapter 5 sets out the role of teleosemantics, while chapter 6 develops the crucial kinds of intentional signs.

• Reconstruct the problem of misrepresentation: In what sense does it introduce normative notions?
• Why is normativity a problem for naturalism?
• How does teleosemantics solve the problem?

Approaching the text

• Chapter 5: teleosemantics
  • How does Millikan portray the tradition’s, Brentano’s approach to intentionality? (p. 63-65)
  • How does Millikan illustrate misrepresentation (can opener)?
  • What are “normal mechanisms”? (p. 69, see also p. 85)
  • Millikan distinguishes between functions of the producers and consumers of representations: which of the two are crucial for teleosemantics?

• Chapter 6: intentionality
  • What are the crucial intentional signs? (p. 77)
  • Which of those is most basic? (80-81)
  • What kind of sign is the food call of the hen? (p. 72-73)
    • Explain the aspects in detail.
    • In what sense do such signs depend on cooperation?
    • Try to find other example of such signs.
  • What are propositional attitudes? And why do representations always come with attitudes? (p. 81)
  • How does Millikan see the relation between intentionality and rationality? (p. 84)

Millikan’s Theory of Language

Basics

Viewed in relation to the common understanding of language as a means to communicate and express thought, Millikan’s theory of language seems quite unusual. She claims that understanding language is a form of direct perception of the world. With this simple claim Millikan endorses two uncommon ideas at once. Firstly, when talking about forms of perception, we normally think of our sense organs. We seem to perceive the falling rain through our eyes and ears, for example, but not through linguistic units. Secondly, even if we assume that understanding language might involve a perception of the world, we will be inclined to think of that act as an indirect act. That is, we first hear or see a sentence, and then we infer something about the world. We first hear the sentence “It’s raining”, and then we conclude that it might be raining (and thus might perceive it in our imagination). However, this is not how Millikan thinks of it. What, then, does she mean? Here is an example that expands on Varieties of Meaning from 2012:

“There are many ways to recognize, for example, rain. There is a way that rain feels when it falls on you, and a way that it looks out the window. There is a way that it sounds falling on the rooftop, 'retetetetetet,' and a way that it sounds falling on the ground, 'shshshshsh.' And falling on English speakers, here is another way it can sound: 'Hey, it's raining!'” (2012, see also Varieties, 122)

Come to think of it! Exemplified this way, it doesn’t sound so strange after all. In fact, the idea of the “semantic mapping function” (p. 114) might – to some extend – not be so far from the picture theory that Wittgenstein defends in the Tractatus: remember how the musical notation is supposed to be a picture of the music! But although Wittgenstein’s idea of picturing might have inspired Millikan, Wittgenstein’s picture theory allows for far more traditional readings than Millikan’s position. In defending her thesis, Millikan does not only argue for language as derived from natural signs, she also challenges some fundamental assumptions about language, perception and the idea of directness vs. indirectness (or something mediated by inference).

Approaching the text

• Begin by considering the conclusion, i.e. the last paragraph of ch. 9, p. 125. Which modes of perception are considered? In which sense are they not inferential?
• What is that makes you assume that seeing the rain falling against your window is somehow more direct? Might your perception be less direct, if you were or have to wear glasses? (see also p. 125)
• Think about the comparison between the dog’s understanding of its master (“Go for a walk?”) and ours (“Dinner’s ready!”). In what sense are they direct? (p. 114)
• In the following, Millikan describes issues involved in speech comprehension resulting in the assumption that understanding language works by “passing through a number of layered stages of intentional representation in the process of translating public language signs into inner representations of world affairs.” (p. 116) Why is this process not a form of indirect representation? (p. 117)
• How do traditional theories handle “indirect perception”? (p. 117)
• Reconstruct Millikan’s account of why “translation” is direct: on p. 118-119.
• Why is there no such thing as “direct perception” and why does this claim not contradict her theory? (p. 120)
• What reasons does Millikan give for the assumption that her theory might appear unintuitive? P. 122