Understanding language rules in Ruth Garrett Millican's biosemantics

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify how the rules of language are understood in Ruth Garrett Millikan's biosemantics. The specificity of the biosemantic language research program is that the language functions and norms are defined by analogy with biological ones. The function of the normal using language structures is to stabilize them and preserve the current usage. The philosophical foundation of Millikan's biosemantics is naturalistic realism, which includes the belief in the existence of real types and real categories independent of theory. Every person has abilities to recognize and track the same things at their variety– unitrackers, as well as unique individual interconnections of various aspects of information about the same things – unicepts. Moreover, Millikan's philosophy of language is based on the understanding linguistic signs as natural conventions; on usage-based theoretical approaches in linguistics; on the classical correspondence theory of truth and the related understanding of meaning as based on conditions of truth or justification. If rules are understood as unambiguous algorithms or prescriptions observed by the absolute majority, the violation of which necessarily entails the application of sanctions, then, for Millikan, the language conventions are not rules. But the patterns of the sign presenting onto the reality it signifies are rules in that the truth or justification conditions for the sign use can either be met or not, and an utterance using this sign fulfills its stabilizing function only in the first case.