Simplicity and elegance in Millikan’s account of productivity: reply to Martinez

Abstract

This paper responds to a problem, raised by Martinez (2013), for Millikan’s explanation of the interpretability of novel signs in terms of mapping functions. I argue that Martinez’s critique is a logically weakened (and hence more difficult to refute) version of Kripke’s skeptical argument about rule following. Responding to Martinez requires two things. First, we must correctly understand the role of simplicity and elegance in choosing the correct mapping function for a signaling system. Second, we need to understand that mapping functions are descriptions of the features that determine the content of signs; they do not themselves determine the content of signs. Bearing these facts in mind, Martinez’s concern is assuaged. However, we find that this position on the role of mapping functions is not fully consistent with Millikan’s (1990) response to Kripke. I modify her response to Kripke and demonstrate that the alterations do not undermine her view.

Keywords:

• Functions
• intentionality
• mapping
• Martinez
• Millikan
• productivity
• teleosemantics

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was supported by DFG Research Group 1614. Manolo Martinez, Ruth Millikan, and Miljana Milojevic discussed this paper with me at length, and I thank them for the many resulting improvements. I wish to thank the editors and reviewers for Philosophical Psychology for thoughtful and patient comments that have helped me produce a much stronger paper.

Notes

1. A fully detailed discussion of the relationship between Millikan’s theory of intentionality and productivity appears in Leahy (2014), and the cardinal statement of the view is in Millikan (1984). The current discussion makes many space-saving simplifications.

2. I draw my description of bee dances from Georgia Tech College of Computing (2011). This description serves our illustrative purposes no matter its accuracy.

3. Of course, dances also covary with many other things by accident, but only these two need to be appealed to in the most proximate normal explanation for the nectar-collecting function.

4. A referee for this journal pressed the significance of this point on me, which lead to important improvements in this paper.

5. I do not wish to commit to a counterfactual analysis of causation here.