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White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice
This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan's Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan's central and controversial themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology.
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First published April 29, 1993
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March 4, 2026
It's good philosophy, but I disagree with a lot of it.
The general feeling is that Millikan wants a functional definition of behavior, representation, etc., where “functional” means naturally selected. The problem with that is: often, we don't have the required evidence for establishing whether a trait is naturally selected. RM seems to want to say: it is an empirical fact that representational content is functionally determined (in my sense), but there are prima facie cases where it is not so determined (Swampman etc.). Then RM can't say: well, those cases are not really cases of representation. Circular.
Everything is contained in that passage from p. 149: “What a biological system does as a biological system, and not merely as a pile of atoms, is what its ancestors have historically done that enabled them to survive and reproduce. As a biological system, it does only what it is its biological purpose, or ‘proper function’, to do.”
(Incidentally, the passage fails to distinguish between phylogenetic and ontogenetic adaptations, i.e. adaptations that result from learning within the organism’s lifetime: “With respect to the process of adaptation, we need to distinguish ontogenetic adaptation from phylogenetic adaptation. An organism apable of learning is able to adapt to its environment. It modifies its behavior. A rabbit, for example, may learn where the foxes live and thereby avoid going to those places. Here, a change takes place during the organism’s lifetime. The organism changes its behavior and thereby benefits.”, Sober 1993: 85. This is why Dretske favored learning over selection in terms of the etiology of function.)
It is also not clear that whatever has a selection history and corresponds to something in reality is ipso facto representational: think of Godfrey-Smith's adrenaline flows (Godfrey-Smith 1996).
It is also possible that downright false thoughts promote success: what Papineau calls beliefs’ “secondary purposes” (Papineau 1997): what about those? See also Fodor on repression mechanisms, whose function (why not?) is to keep us from believing unbearable truths (Fodor 1987: 106); on p. 168, RM briefly mentions, but does not address, that point.
Finally, What about sexual selection? Let’s take a well-established finding of evolutionary psychology: Men overinterpret female behaviour as indicative of sexual interest, and it’s adaptive (see Buss 2025). So men were selected for believing falsehoods: women are not sexually interested as often as their detectors were selected for reporting. But we may say that the truth conditions of the detector’s going ON is that the woman is interested, that the detector’s function is to track that state, and that the (perhaps clumsily imprecise) way it does so is irrelevant. Still, misrepresentation here is not a question of environmental change, as with the frog in a lab: the share of misrepresentation is inherent to the ecological functioning of the detector. So the question comes down to what is adaptive: to believe that a woman is interested when she is (even if that involves false positives), or to tend to believe that women are interested by default, i.e. even when they are not—to a certain degree? I see no principled way of ruling in favor of one description rather than the other. For instance, we have no real reason to say: it is because men believe that women are interested when they are that they reproduce, rather than: it is because men tend to believe… even when they are not that they reproduce. Because maybe men would be reproducing less if they had less false positives. And maybe some false positives nevertheless lead to reproductive success! But if there is no way of deciding which is ‘adaptive’, then there is no way of deciding which is functional. In other words, you could say: the function of the detector is to represent female sexual interest. But it is not a function of the detector to represent it accurately: that is not part of its Normal functioning. The male’s sexual interest detector is functioning perfectly Normally, as it should be, promoting the male’s reproductive goals, when it misrepresents the world. The very error-proneness of the system is what is being selected for (cf. error management theory, see Johnson et al. 2013). Biases are not by-products of adaptations. They are adaptive, and therefore functional.
Reading paper after paper saying pretty much the same thing, I kept coming back to the idea that it could be a further function of the organism to get and maintain itself in conditions favorable to the successful performance of its proper functions: a meta-function. I thought: this would put agency back in teleosemantics. Then I came across Bickhard's work, which is basically a detailed outline of just that kind of framework. Life.
The general feeling is that Millikan wants a functional definition of behavior, representation, etc., where “functional” means naturally selected. The problem with that is: often, we don't have the required evidence for establishing whether a trait is naturally selected. RM seems to want to say: it is an empirical fact that representational content is functionally determined (in my sense), but there are prima facie cases where it is not so determined (Swampman etc.). Then RM can't say: well, those cases are not really cases of representation. Circular.
Everything is contained in that passage from p. 149: “What a biological system does as a biological system, and not merely as a pile of atoms, is what its ancestors have historically done that enabled them to survive and reproduce. As a biological system, it does only what it is its biological purpose, or ‘proper function’, to do.”
(Incidentally, the passage fails to distinguish between phylogenetic and ontogenetic adaptations, i.e. adaptations that result from learning within the organism’s lifetime: “With respect to the process of adaptation, we need to distinguish ontogenetic adaptation from phylogenetic adaptation. An organism apable of learning is able to adapt to its environment. It modifies its behavior. A rabbit, for example, may learn where the foxes live and thereby avoid going to those places. Here, a change takes place during the organism’s lifetime. The organism changes its behavior and thereby benefits.”, Sober 1993: 85. This is why Dretske favored learning over selection in terms of the etiology of function.)
It is also not clear that whatever has a selection history and corresponds to something in reality is ipso facto representational: think of Godfrey-Smith's adrenaline flows (Godfrey-Smith 1996).
It is also possible that downright false thoughts promote success: what Papineau calls beliefs’ “secondary purposes” (Papineau 1997): what about those? See also Fodor on repression mechanisms, whose function (why not?) is to keep us from believing unbearable truths (Fodor 1987: 106); on p. 168, RM briefly mentions, but does not address, that point.
Finally, What about sexual selection? Let’s take a well-established finding of evolutionary psychology: Men overinterpret female behaviour as indicative of sexual interest, and it’s adaptive (see Buss 2025). So men were selected for believing falsehoods: women are not sexually interested as often as their detectors were selected for reporting. But we may say that the truth conditions of the detector’s going ON is that the woman is interested, that the detector’s function is to track that state, and that the (perhaps clumsily imprecise) way it does so is irrelevant. Still, misrepresentation here is not a question of environmental change, as with the frog in a lab: the share of misrepresentation is inherent to the ecological functioning of the detector. So the question comes down to what is adaptive: to believe that a woman is interested when she is (even if that involves false positives), or to tend to believe that women are interested by default, i.e. even when they are not—to a certain degree? I see no principled way of ruling in favor of one description rather than the other. For instance, we have no real reason to say: it is because men believe that women are interested when they are that they reproduce, rather than: it is because men tend to believe… even when they are not that they reproduce. Because maybe men would be reproducing less if they had less false positives. And maybe some false positives nevertheless lead to reproductive success! But if there is no way of deciding which is ‘adaptive’, then there is no way of deciding which is functional. In other words, you could say: the function of the detector is to represent female sexual interest. But it is not a function of the detector to represent it accurately: that is not part of its Normal functioning. The male’s sexual interest detector is functioning perfectly Normally, as it should be, promoting the male’s reproductive goals, when it misrepresents the world. The very error-proneness of the system is what is being selected for (cf. error management theory, see Johnson et al. 2013). Biases are not by-products of adaptations. They are adaptive, and therefore functional.
Reading paper after paper saying pretty much the same thing, I kept coming back to the idea that it could be a further function of the organism to get and maintain itself in conditions favorable to the successful performance of its proper functions: a meta-function. I thought: this would put agency back in teleosemantics. Then I came across Bickhard's work, which is basically a detailed outline of just that kind of framework. Life.
March 23, 2008
Not my usual cup of tea, but thought-provoking and not too pretentious.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews