Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning ** 1/2

Varieties of Meaning is a work of academic philosophy. The title and the back-cover abstract led me to believe it would explore the common thread that connects all the different things we say have meaning: "people mean to do various things, tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things ... What does meaning in the sense of purpose have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying?" I've been pondering the meaning of "meaning" since my undergraduate days, and hoped for new insights.

But Millikan's topic is different. She uses evolutionary psychology to explore the nature of our internal representations (aka concepts), how they differ from those of non-human animals, and how we might have developed them. She concludes that concepts are more directly goal-oriented than is generally assumed, and that they are not constructed from intermediate sense impressions.

This topic is interesting even if it's not what I was looking for. However, Millikan falls into the common academic trap of focusing too much on esoteric terminological disputes at the expense of clear exposition, not to mention the evolutionary psychology vice of "just so stories."

There were a few asides that intrigued me. One was a (probably false) anecdote about how venomous snakes hunt and eat mice without the benefit of a concept of "mouse":

The story is that certain venomous snakes perceive mice for purposes of striking by sight, trace the path of the dying mouse by small, and find its head so as to swallow that part first by feel, and that none of those jobs can be accomplished using any other sensory modality. A snake that was wired up this way would merely perceive first a "strike me," then a "chase me," and finally a "swallow me," having no grasp at all that what it struck, followed, and swallowed was the same thing.

Another was the distinction, attributed to Gilbert Ryle, between "task verbs" that describe an attempt to do something (hunt, look, listen) and "achievement verbs" that indicate success (find, see, hear).