BOOK REVIEWS 137

Grice's analysis of meaning is threatened by the thesis that the identity of (say) a
particular intention is determined by its place in a net of other intentions and
beliefs.
Not, in fact, that Davidson himself fares much better. One would expect a book
devoted to his views on interpretation to pay special attention to what Davidson
means by 'interpret', and as, e.g., the first three sentences of 'Radical Interpret-
ation' surely make clear, his use of the word is somewhat technical. To interpret
a word or utterance is, simply, to know what the word or utterance means on a
particular occasion of use, so that any connotation of hermeneutical deliberation
that might accompany ordinary uses of the word are to be extruded. Missing this

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at West Virginia University on March 9, 2015

point, Hacking once ridiculed Davidson for suggesting that, in every conversation
with another, 'I have to hold before me the possibility that he is an alien'. But,
concerned as he is to present Davidson as a latter-day Schleiermacher (p. 46),
Malpas also misses the point, so that in reply to Hacking he can only comfort
himself with the lame reflection that 'one of the most powerful features of twenti-
eth-century culture has been precisely the experience of the alien intruding into
the familiar' (p. 182). With interpreters like this, who needs critics?
I could go on, but no doubt the message has got across. The only easy improve-
ment that one could make to this book would be to change its title. For this is
Davidson: seen through a glass darkly.

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor IAN RUMFITT

White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. BY RUTH GARRETT MIH.IKAN.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford Books/MIT Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 387. Price
£
35-95-)

These essays are not really for Alice, Ruth Millikan tells us in the Preface, because
Alice is an exceptionally bright and versatile child, and these essays are elementary.
They are intended to expand and clarify, but not replace, the naturalist view of
intentionality, language and meaning set out in her Language, Thought, and Other
Biological Categories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1984). Alice's main role is to play the
foil to the White Queen in the final, lengthy, title essay of the volume. The White
Queen spends half an hour a day exercising her mind by believing impossible
things; Alice declares this to be impossible. This stages the debate between Milli-
kan (in the White Queen's corner) and much of the tradition of analytic philo-
sophy (siding with Alice), which goes wrong, according to Millikan, in assuming a
cluster of myths (largely deriving from Descartes) about what is given to conscious-
ness. Millikan calls this cluster of myths of the given 'meaning rationalism'. This
syndrome comprises three inter-twined epistemological claims about what you can
know about your own thoughts through mere internal inspection: (a) that two of
them are identical or different in meaning; (b) that any of your thought contents
are ambiguous or univocal; and indeed, (c) that your thoughts are meaningful at
all (as opposed to empty). With these epistemic capacities intact, people are
guaranteed to know when they are thinking contradictory, confused or empty
©The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1995.
i38 BOOK REVIEWS

propositions. The issue between Alice and the White Queen turns on the possi-
bility of knowing a priori what is logically possible, since if Alice knows a priori what
is and is not logically possible, and if she is rational, then surely she cannot (will
not?) believe what she knows to be impossible. A diatribe against meaning rational-
ism was offered in the epilogue of LTOBC; here, Millikan expands on it by militat-
ing in her support various externalist accounts of content with the aim 'to kill
meaning rationalism dead, and then beat on it'. Neither meaning nor rationality
is in the head alone; there can be no intentional description of the causal roles of
an individual's thoughts, and from this it follows that propositional-attitude ascrip-
tions cannot be used in a scientific (predictive) theory of behaviour.

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at West Virginia University on March 9, 2015

But Millikan is a realist about the intentional, and her goal is to provide a nat-
uralist account of it. Her realism (LTOBC p. 329) seems to commit her to main-
taining the existence of a determinate relation between representations and what
they represent. Her diatribe against meaning rationalism, on the other hand, com-
mits her in part to denying that the items figuring in the various myths of the given
(sense data, modes of presentation, intensions) and their contemporary progeny
(narrow content, psychological role, etc.) are to play a role in specifying this
relation. Millikan's strategy is to deny that this determinate relation must itself be
known; instead of locating in the head the relations between the head and the world
that constitute meaning, she locates them between the head and the world, in biologi-
cal norms. 'When functioning properly, a mental representation co-occurs with its
represented, pictures what it represents, and ... participates in appropriate infer-
ences' (WQP p. 11). As theorists, we might come to understand these norms, but
our doing so plays no epistemic (justificatory or foundational) role in grounding
their role as norms.
The main difficulty for anyone attempting to give a realist account of intentional
phenomena by positing real correspondents to which one's thoughts refer is the
normativity problem (see WQP Introduction): in thought, perception, language
and action, mistakes or errors can occur and yet still not impugn the identity of
the mistaken item as a thought, percept, meaningful utterance, or action. My mis-
taken beliefs are still beliefs, my akratic actions are still intentional actions, my
malapropisms still enable me to communicate. But any proposed relation between
the intentional item in question and what it represents that forges the connection
loo close seems unable to account for the errors; and yet any relation that slackens
the requirement so as to accommodate the errors seems to fall short of providing
a determinate relation between the representation and what it represents. And yet
providing this determinate relation is at the very heart of realism regarding the
intentional phenomena in question; a realism that Millikan wants to preserve.
Millikan claims to have offered a kind of Aristotelian realism that solves the
normativity problem; but, on the face of it, it is worth worrying about how this
kind of solution can work. Getting the meaning-determining relation out of the
head is a good idea; but perhaps it is a good idea because it is a first step towards
getting rid of it altogether. Positing (in Ryle's phrase) 'phosphorescent' items of
consciousness is motivated both to provide the determinate relation that would
save a realist construal of the intentional, and to provide a foundation for our
©The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1995.

A
 BOOK REVIEWS 139
knowledge of these items. Removing these items from consciousness and giving
up a foundationahst epistemology may be a good beginning. But how does locating
the determinate relations in the world solve the problem of normativity? Whether
in the head or in the world, if accordance with these norms determines the meaning
of a term, then how do we make sense of those meaningful terms that are norm-
violating?
How biology solves the problem is what Millikan takes to be the major focus of
LTOBC, and this is expanded upon in this volume. 'Picturing, indicating, and infer-
ence are equally involved in human representing, but as biological norms rather
than as mere dispositions. It is not the facts about how the system does operate

Downloaded from http://pq.oxfordjournals.org/ at West Virginia University on March 9, 2015

that make it a representing system and determine what it represents. Rather, it is
the facts about what it would be doing if it were operating according to biological
norms' (WQPp. 10).
The first two chapters expand Millikan's view of biological function: in the first,
she contrasts her view with Larry Wright's and stresses the need for an account of
proper function to look towards an organism's history. In the second, she defends
this historical approach against recent criticism in evolutionary biology. In chs 3 -
9 Millikan clarifies her views on mental representation and psychological explan-
ation. Ch. 3 argues that folk-psychology need not be a nomological theory in order
to play a role in the development of cognitive science. In chs 4 and 6 she contrasts
her view on teleology with Dretske, Stampe and Fodor. Her anti-individualism is
directly confronted in chs 7 and 8, where she argues that the proper object of
study in the behavioural sciences is the functional form of an animal's activity, and
that these functions are performed through the mediation of the environment. In
chs 10 and 11 she defends her realism, and her commitment to a correspondence
theory of truth, against Putnam's arguments for anti-realism; and in ch. 12 she
provides her own naturalist solution to the meaning-sceptical paradox that Krip-
ke's Wittgenstein presents. Chs 13 and 14 constitute a third of the volume; here
she vigorously continues her arguments against the myths, discussed above, that
have for such a long time supported the opposition.
The writing is lively, forceful, and witty; and most of the essays are free of the
technical notions that made LTOBC difficult to read. Millikan makes a very pro-
nounced effort here to re-expound her ideas in the light of contemporary dis-
cussions on the topics. Some of these discussions, however, especially the title
essay, presuppose an extensive familiarity with the contemporary literature in
philosophy of mind and language. These essays, then, are for Alice after all, since
they are not really elementary. I am assuming as well that besides being bright and
versatile, Alice (by this time) has some background in philosophy of mind. The
reader with such a background ought to enjoy studying these chapters (and
rereading LTOBC) to decide if Millikan has indeed offered an account which
solves the problem she sets for herself.

University of Sheffield JULIA TANNEY

©The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1995.