Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language: A Biological Model.
| Autor | Duhau, Laura |
| Cargo | Reseña de libro |
Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language: A Biological Model, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, 240 pp.
Millikan is one of the most important naturalists in the philosophy of mind. She is known as an outstanding defender of "teleological" theories of content, but she also has defended a naturalistic theory of concepts (2000) and a biological account of the nature and development of inner representations (2004). In Language: A Biological Model, Millikan continues with this general naturalistic-biological approach, now focusing on the language faculty and some other issues of interest to philosophers of language, such as the relation between language and thought, the utility of conceptual analysis, the nature of illocutionary acts, and the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.
The book is composed of ten different articles. Two of these are entirely new while two others are substantial revisions of previously published papers; the remaining six are more or less the same as in previously published versions. Although the biological perspective gives some unity to the collection, the topics addressed across the ten articles are various and divergent, and it would be impossible to discuss them all here. For this reason, I will focus on three of the main ideas proposed by Millikan across the book: the idea that natural language is conventional but doesn't require regular conformity or prescriptive rules (discussed across most of the papers but mainly in "Language Conventions Made Simple", "In Defense of Public Language", "On Meaning, Meaning and Meaning" and "Proper Function and Convention in Speech Acts"); the idea that there is a useful notion of public language (mainly discussed in "In Defense of Public Language"); and the idea that understanding language doesn't require thoughts of speaker intentions because it is a form of direct perception of the world, and therefore children don't have to have a theory of mind to learn language (mainly discussed in "Semantics/Pragmatics: (Purposes and Cross-Purposes)").
Millikan shares with some linguists and philosophers the idea that conventions are central to language, but she has her own view about how we should understand "convention". She questions the idea that 'conventions involve prescriptive rules and/or regularities. Contrary to much philosophical opinion, Millikan claims that conventions need not be adhered to either by the majority of the members of a community or by an average member of it. According to her, conventions in language are not a matter of what speakers do most of the time. Rather, conventions are patterns of action that fulfill a function and involve both hearers and speakers, and that have been reproduced partly due to weight of precedent (and not because they are the only or the best patterns capable of performing the function they are performing). A pattern has been reproduced in this sense (and not for example, reproduced due to genes) so long as "its form is derived from a previous item of items having, in certain respects, the same form, such that had the model(s) been different in relevant respects the copy would have differed accordingly" (p. 3).
Thus, all that is required for a linguistic pattern to be conventional is that it be repeated often enough to survive, and that such repetition be somewhat arbitrary (other patterns may have served as...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu pruebaCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
