Negation, Contrariety, and Practical Reasoning: Comments on Millikan’s Varieties of Meaning

Abstract

Part IV of Ruth Millikan's rich and thought-provoking Varieties of Meaning starts with a characterization of the most primitive form of thinking as involving what she calls pushmi-pullyu (P-P) representations. task she sets herself is to set out the limitations of being a purely P-P animal (that is, an animal that can represent the world only in a pushmipullyu manner) and to explore how these limitations are overcome in the evolution of higher cognitive capacities. In effect Millikan proposes a speculative account of the phylogeny of cognition. Her account contains a number of striking insights about the nature of nonlinguistic cognition and how it differs from the thinking of language-users. In this note I want to comment on the resources that she provides for thinking about practical reasoning in the interesting category of nonlinguistic thinkers lying between the purely P-P creatures and the sophisticated language-users described in her final chapter. Let me begin at the beginning with purely P-P creatures. P-P representations are very much akin to what the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson termed affor dances (see Gibson 1979 and Bermudez 1998 Ch. 5 for philosophical discussion), although Millikan has little sympathy for the anti-representationalist strands in Gibson's thinking. P-P representations are fundamentally indexical: The purely pushmi-pullyu animal always represents affairs in its world as bearing certain relations to itself (p. 168). What are represented are goals and routes to them (taking 'routes' in both a literal and a metaphorical sense). But, as Millikan notes, there is a difference between representing a goal and representing a goal-state. If an animal is pursuing prey, the prey is the goal and the goal is represented in the representations that control its behavior. goal-state, in contrast, is the animal's catching the prey. Purely P-P creatures do not represent goal-states. They represent targets, but not the state of the target being attained (at least not before