Page 265 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

fundamental relationship is not between some way the world is and a sentence in the language of thought. It is rather between elements of the world—individuals and kinds—and concepts. A Ideological semantics needs to be recast as a theory of reference.
It is at best an open question whether ideological theories explain enough of our capacities for mental representation to get causal theories of reference off the ground. Millikan (1984) and Papineau (1987) have both defended ambitious Ideological programs, but have yet to win many converts.
6.3 Functional Role
Can the representational capacities implicit in causal theories of reference be explained by looking upstream from the formation of the concept rather than, or as well as, downstream to its causes? There is some plausibility in the idea that a concept is a cow concept rather than a cow-appearance concept or a cow-or- thin-buffalo concept because of the way it is used in the cognitive system. Two factor' theories of content have been quite popular in the literature on the mind (see Field 1978; Lycan 1988). They take content to be fixed by some combination of causal relations between mind and world, and functional relations within the mind. Unfortunately there are important problems in recruiting two factor theories to the problem of explaining the nature of primitive referential relations.
First, in their normal formulation two factor theories presuppose a solution to referential semantics, taking their problem to be accounting for an extra dimension of content, a functional notion that explains the differences between referentially identical representation. Field (1978) and Lycan (1988) take referential semantics and functional role to be inde- pendent vectors; if so, functional role is no use in eliminating indeterminacies of reference.
Second, functional role theories concentrate on inference, but an appeal to inference seemsunlikely to explain the reference of concepts. For concepts do not have inferential roles. Only sentences, or sentence- like representations, do. Moreover, an inferential role theory of content may leave us with a holistic theory of content. For the inferential productivity of a rep- resentation depends on the other intentional states of the system. The belief that wallaroos are edible prompts the belief that the moon is full if you happen also to believe that wallaroos are edible when the moon is full. Holistic theories of represen- tation are problematic in making representation idio- syncratic; people never act the same way because they mean the same thing, because they never do mean the same thing.
7. Conclusion
The ambitious program is ambitious, but it is a worthy ambition. It deserves pursuit, for success would enable
us to integrate our folk and scientific conceptions of ourselves qua language users. A failure (in the absence of an alternative route for the reduction of the sem- antic to the more fundamental) would force us either into the wholesale rejection of our folk theory of our- selves as thinkers and talkers or into dividing our self conception into two incommensurable chunks, a scientific and a folk image. The relation between these chunks would be obscure, and their joint truth would be still more so. The ambitious program is not yet triumphant, but neither has it failed.
Seealso:Indexicals;Meaning:Philosophical Theories; Names and Descriptions; Sense.
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