This afternoon I bopped over to Cambridge* to attend one of the MIT philosophy colloquia. The speaker was Ruth Millikan, and her subject was Let me count the ways to tell a weasel: On extensional meanings and nature’s clumps [PDF, 692KB]. To brutally summarize a nice, wide-ranging account, she set out to show that the classical question of how linguistic reference can be justified is simply answered by the natural “clumping” of class-defining properties in the real world. I agreed with her thesis, and enjoyed the way she presented it. However I think that she overemphasized the importance of the intrinsic “clumpiness” of the world and understated the role of agents (i.e. us) in choosing the clumps that were significant to us. This certainly confused a couple of the audience, who perceived an unintended dichotomy between “natural” and “purposeful” clumps. (They’re all natural: we are part of nature.)
I participated in the Q&A, and went upstairs for the social afterwards, but Millikan was surrounded by old friends. Thus I wasn’t able to ask my two big questions:

1. Was her main thesis about language or meaning-making intentional agents in general? In other words, is human language the focus of the work, or is it simply a convenient system used by a particular class of agents?
2. Although she focussed on “language as it is”, she did discuss how linguistic usage shifts and evolves. So does she like the concept of memes, or does she have another explanatory model that she prefers?

I was pleased to find that I felt right at home, and thoroughly comfortable with the material. One reason I’d wanted to attend this particular seminar was that when we read Millikan in Dennett’s course a year ago, I found her stuff particularly hard to wrap my head around. I guess I learned something after all. Cool.
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* Well, actually I took the Green Line to Park Street, wandered through the back streets of Beacon Hill, and then walked across the Longfellow Bridge.