Reply to Rosenberg

Abstract

My central argument that there's no principled line between people's purposes and merely biological purposes is (not that both rest on some form of selection but) that people's explicit purposes emerge from and are continuous with prior background purposes such as purposes derived from conditioning, from explicit recognition of what one finds rewarding itself the fruit of conditioning and natural selection from trial and error in thought, and so forth. I'm listening for Rosenberg's own principled answer to my question whether when you lightly touch the brake on a curve during an animated conversation or turn off the alarm in your sleep, it is your whole person that has the purpose or rather some subpersonal mechanism within. Rosenberg ignores that my so stories are firmly anchored to studies in ethology, experimental work in animal psychology, experimental work in both cognitive and social psychology, and in neurology. Clearly, any proposed analysis of the main increments in the development from primitive behavior controls to human behavior controls can only be a matter of reasonable speculation. Is this out of place in science? In philosophy? (Or is it just that admitting it is unseemly?) Rosenberg is right that I don't offer a theory of the origin of detached representations of goal states. I explain that they are not needed for the guidance of a great deal of surprisingly sophisticated purposeful activity, but not where they come from evolutionarily speaking. I don't say where representations subject to negation hence sensitive to contradiction come from either. In both cases, I try merely to show what they do for us that couldn't be done with more primitive representations. Yes, there are real differences between ordinary seeing and seeing on television and between ordinary hearing and hearing through language. These differences are recognized in common speech and carefully discussed both in Varieties and in (Millikan, 2000). But I'm interested here in similarities that have standardly been missed between gaining information by ordinary perception and by testimony. Overlooking these