Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information

by Ruth Garrett Millikan

Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a highly original account of cognition - of how we get to grips with the world in thought. The question at the heart of her book is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', but answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The starting assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language.

Millikan makes a number of innovations. Central to the book is her introduction of the ideas of unitrackers and unicepts, whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience. She offers a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms; a naturalist sketch of conceptual development; a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information; a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction; a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs; new descriptions of indexicals, demonstratives and intensional contexts; and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Psychology

250 pages, Hardcover

Published November 28, 2017

Reviews

[Moreau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is beyond good. Millikan at her clearest. She is developing in greater detail some of the ideas that have made her famous. If you like teleosemantics it is a must read.

[Philbro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seemingly entitled as a response to (concept-nativist) Fodor’s 1998 book “Concepts”, Millikan asserts here that not only are concepts not native (they are utterly empirical), but they are not even concepts as traditionally understood. That is, Millikan dispenses with the notion that concepts are shareable entities amongst minds; what allows for understanding are each “unicept’s” grounding in the external world at large (“uni” because each “same-tracks” a single entity - or property or kind thereof). But rather than a response to Fodor, “Beyond Concepts” is really a continuation and update of her work since “Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories” (1984). At the crossroads of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, Millikan puts forth a model of our most primitive operations of mind, ingeniously situating perception and language on a continuum, as well as blurring the line between semantics and pragmatics. In Millikan’s words (p.181), “The claim is that Normal linguistic communication is not best thought of as a transfer of beliefs from mind to mind but as a speaker’s displaying to a hearer some piece of the world, ‘displaying’ in the way things may be displayed for ordinary perception.” What adds strength to her theory of cognition (“speculative psychology” as she says) is that her ideas dovetail seamlessly with recent models of cognition at the more fine-grained level of neuroscience, and I’m thinking of the Thousand Brains model of Jeff Hawkins in particular here (with a most fruitful intersection where Millikan makes her bold claim that perception - including Normal language - does not require inference). An amazing achievement that will unpack itself in the minds of humanity for years to come.

[Charlie Huenemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth Garrett Millikan offers a brilliant, persuasive account of how the human mind organizes experience and language. It is rich with examples that are at the same time familiar and striking. Given that it was published in 2017, I doubt that machine learning (let alone LLMs) were on her mind, but it seems to me her take on human cognition could be made to map neatly on AI models. In place of concepts, RGM offers "unicepts" (which are basically concepts bound within single minds) and "unitrackers" that connect elements of experience to those unicepts. It might sound like playing with words, but the shift avoids a great many puzzles and problems surrounding the traditional notion of concepts. Her work is a plausible approach to a natural understanding of humans figuring out their environments, without employing spooky platonic entities.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The reading experience was surprisingly similar to that of Husserl’s Ideas! Interesting discussion of how infosigns (Dretske’s needle in the gas gauge, that doesn’t represent anything unless a correlation with the quantity of gas in the tank obtains) redefine the semantic pragmatic distinction and the saying showing (or rather, understanding seeing) distinction. Understanding a language becomes another perceptual process/ability, and communication is accounted for as deeply intermodal (I can start a sentence with words and finish it with gestures). All of this could’ve fitted in an article though.

[Davide Recchia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing but hard to read for non-technical audience