Dretske, Fred.  “Misrepresentation.”  In Mind and Cognition: A Reader, William G. Lycan, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) pp. 129-143.

Millikan, Ruth Garrett.  Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6.

Plantinga, Alvin.  Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter11: “Naturalism versus Proper Function?”, pp. 194-215.

Richman, Kenneth A.  “Knowledge and Proper Function.”  Manuscript.

Description of seminar:
In her book Language, Thought, and other Biological Categories, Ruth Garrett Millikan argues that the concept of proper function can be used to solve many problems in a wide variety of philosophical areas.  For instance, it can help us to address metaphysical questions about natural kinds (e.g., what makes all hearts members of the kind ‘heart’?).  It can also, she argues, help us to understand how brain states can be beliefs, and how we might understand the difference between knowledge and mere belief.

In this senior seminar, we will be examining Millikan’s theory of proper functions and what it has to say about mental content (the nature of belief, what makes a mental state be about something in particular) and epistemology.  We will begin with some introductory material on the problem of content.  We will then move to a discussion of Millikan’s theory of proper function and its bearing on philosophy of mind.  Next, we will discuss some of the implications of the theory of content that Millikan defends for theories of justification/warrant in epistemology.

The seminar will meet once each week for the ten-week term.