Ruth Millikan's Biosemantics

Ruth Millikan advances the notion that representation creation ought to be analyzed by considering representation consumption rather than the representation production analysis which leads to causal/ informational accounts such as those by Fodor, Dretske, Dennis Stampe, or Mohan Matthen.

What struck me most about her paper "Biosemantics" was the sweep of her consideration of representations. Representations are fundamental to survival of extremely primitive forms of life.

"Dretske tells of a species of bacteria which orient themselves away from toxic oxygen rich surface water by attending to their magnetosomes, tiny inner magnets. This allows them to move to oxygen free water... Concentrate instead on how the systems that react to the representation work, on what these systems need in order to do their job. What they need is only that the pull be in the direction of oxygen-free water at the time...."

It looks like it is representations all the way down- since the very beginning. This very activity of making sense of sensory inputs so that the organism may react in a way beneficial to its survival exists even in organisms without brains, even in organisms without neurons or even multiple cells. So the Word is necessary at the most fundamental forms of life.

Secondly, all sensory systems are relativist.

Note also that, on the present view, representations manufactured in identical ways by different species of animal might have different contents. Thus, a certain kind of small swift image on the toad's retina manufactured by his eye lens, represents a bug, for that is what it must correspond to if the reflex it (invariably) triggers is to perform its proper functions normally, while exactly the same kind of small swift image on the retina of a male hoverfly, manufactured, let us suppose, by a nearly identical lens, represents a passing female hoverfly...

Dennett and Fodor attack Millikan's position as advocating a proposition that bacteria and paramecia have mental states- that they think. This of course is not what Millikan is proposing, and she enumerates several fundamental characteristics that differentiate human beliefs from other representations.

One implication of what Millikan is saying is that the evolution of the representations is very very old indeed. Each of the characteristics vary in sophistication. Some would be present as an innovation among higher forms of life, but still be unthinking creatures. For example, the innovation that representations can be persistently stored in order that the pattern of sensory data may be represented in the same way. This becomes the basis of learning, but note that such representations need not be true. They can be rules of thumb that work more often than not. As long as a persistent representation delivers even a modest survival advantage, over time, the weight of numbers delivers triumph over the organism without the persistent representation.

It seems immoderate to call these persistent representations "beliefs", yet that is how the literature appears to habitually refer to them. That can be forgiven, since most considerations of the functions of mind have a horizon that quickly falls off outside the set of hominids.