Abstract
Intentions and conventions can “make a thing be what it is” in two different ways. Taken separately, neither has any magic in it at all. Neither produces objects of a kind that is in any way remarkable or that requires any special mode of understanding. Only by running these two ways together in our minds do we imagine “socially constructed” or “socially constituted” objects to be other than wholly mundane.
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Notes
- 1.
I actually think there are no such rules, except being in the real kind named by the word “dog.” On this, see (Millikan 2010; 2015 Chs. 2, 7).
The belief that having ideas of various “social objects” or “social kinds” might require having a theory of mind seems to result from the assumption that to think of a thing requires grasping its essential nature. Since it is true, of course, that what binds many such kinds together is the way in which people’s intentions have causally molded them into kinds, it would follow that thinking of these kinds would involve thinking of people’s intentions. I will expand some on this below, but the basic work needed is in the above references.
- 2.
Interesting, in this connection, is (Hughs 2008).
- 3.
These claims are clarified and supported in the references cited two paragraphs above.
- 4.
Similar things can be said about the use of money by ordinary people. It is typically used without any thought or understanding of the conventional nature of financial transactions.
- 5.
For a full discussion, see my (2005 Ch. 8).
- 6.
Each of these kinds of history independently lends what I have called a “proper function” to the item with that history. Linguistic forms in use always possess two sources of function, one corresponding to conventional meaning, the other to speaker purpose (Millikan 1984 Ch. 4, 2005 Ch. 8). This has the interesting result that a linguistic form in use sometimes possesses conflicting proper functions.
References
Hughs, J. 2008. An artifact is to use; an introduction to instrumental functions. Synthese 168(1): 179–199.
Millikan, R.G. 1984. Language, thought and other biological categories. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Millikan, R.G. 2004. Varieties of meaning, the Jean Nicod Lectures 2002. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Millikan, R.G. 2005. Language: A biological model. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Millikan, R.G. 2010. On knowing the meaning; with a coda on Swampman. Mind 119(473): 43–81.
Millikan, R.G. 2015. Unicepts, language and natural information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strawson, P.F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. The Philosophical Review 73(4): 439–460.
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Millikan, R.G. (2014). Deflating Socially Constructed Objects: What Thoughts Do to the World. In: Gallotti, M., Michael, J. (eds) Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9147-2_3
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