The goal of this paper was to assess the gap between Millikan’s particular views about some of the proximate psychological mechanisms underlying human communication and three core assumptions of the Gricean approach: the mindreading thesis, the separability thesis, and the ostensive nature of communicative agency. I have criticized five of Millikan’s basic claims about psychological mechanisms: (i) verbal understanding is best construed as an extended form of perception; (ii) hearers can track the domains of intentional conventional signs without representing any of the speaker’s psychological states; (iii) the overlap between the interests of speakers and hearers undermines the separability thesis; (iv) humans can predict others’ behavior out of social conformity; (v) developmental psychology supports the view that neither verbal understanding nor language acquisition requires a representational theory of mind.
Millikan’s major teleosemantic contribution has been to open an entirely novel approach to the continued reproduction of intentional conventional public-language signs. As was shown by the discussion of whether her view of the proper function of descriptive and prescriptive utterances is consistent with the separability thesis, there is room for disagreement about particular psychological mechanisms within a teleosemantic approach. I do not think that Millikan’s teleosemantic framework for addressing the continued reproduction of intentional conventional signs mandates the particular choice of proximate psychological mechanisms that she recommends. One of the major challenges for the scientific investigation of cultural evolution is to make sure that the proximate psychological mechanisms that underlie the continued reproduction of human cultural conventions are supported by findings from experimental psychological research, in particular developmental psychology.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors for inviting me to write this essay, and to Ned Block, Carsten Hansen, Georges Rey, Dan Sperber and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.