In every philosopher’s career, there comes a time to look back on accomplishments, assess achievements, evaluate one’s place in a canon that dates to an era when Ancient Greeks still roamed the Earth. Perhaps many of you have wondered when I’d finally get around to doing this. Sadly, this is not the night for that splendid occasion. Do not pretend to hide your disappointment. Also, do not hesitate to point fingers. Believe me when I tell you that I would take great delight in reporting to you my accomplishments, achievements, and place in the canon. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who knows me well, or, at any rate, has spent a few minutes in conversation with me, or, maybe, has simply observed me in conversation with someone else. They’ll tell you that I am uniquely suited to fete myself, and take obvious pleasure spreading the good word to others.

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          Alas, I have been enlisted to concentrate my philosophical powers on a topic less interesting than myself. My focus? A woman named Ruth Millikan. For philosophers, mention of the Book of Ruth directs thoughts not to the Old Testament, but to LTOBC. This is a shame, because Ruth’s Old Testament book is quite short, as books go, and tells a heartwarming story of redemption and devotion – virtues that receive hardly any mention in LTOBC. Now that I think about it, Ruth’s later books and articles mark a significant departure from the plot line in that first Book of Ruth’s. Gone are references to Bethlehem and Moab, and in their place lurk hoverflies and push-me-pull-yous, but more on these matters in a moment.

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          I want first to turn my finely tuned and oft-picked philosophical nose to LTOBC – unquestionably Professor Millikan’s magnum opus. Here’s a little known fact. Originally, LTOBC had a different title, requiring a different acronym. If she hadn’t taken her editor’s advice, we’d be speaking of BLTOBC, which stood for Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato on Blueberry Cobbler. There’s something down-home and grannyish about this title, and Ruth deserves credit for trying to entice readers with the promise of good old-fashioned, feather-plucked, farm food, but, as her editor was quick to note, bacon, lettuce, and tomato have no more place on blueberry cobbler than they do on cherry cobbler, and so BLTOBC might as well be BLTOCC, and with no reason to prefer one title to the other, best just to forget about the bacon. And that’s how we come to find ourselves today speaking about LTOBC.

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          First a word on a strategy I favor when criticizing a philosopher. My most trenchant criticisms, or at least those that seem always to go unanswered, are typically directed at dead philosophers. This is a strategy I have pursued relentlessly in the past few years, beginning with the groundbreaking “Quine, If You do not Respond to This, it Means that I’m right and You’re Wrong,” and extending recently to the more elegant, “Quine, Silence is Affirmation.” Unfortunately, Ruth seems to have anticipated this line of attack, and has taken measures to prevent it. So, it is to other tactics that I must resort. Happily, this shift in strategy need not force on me the shackles of fairness, charity, or validity that so often prove the undoing of more staid, traditional, and, as is always the case with that sort, narrow-minded philosophers – philosophers so caught up in the search for truth that they have completely misunderstood Russell’s admonition to those who would sooner toil then steal.

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          Here’s a little trick I learned from Stephen Gould, who, due to recent events, I am now prepared to say was all wrong about everything. Start with a little story. The bible is a good place to look, but baseball’s ok too when in a pinch. Then, when you’ve grabbed the audience’s attention with something interesting, talk as fast you can about the boring stuff so that you get it all out before the audience loses interest. You might have noticed that I’ve already done something like this with my mention of the Book of Ruth. The difference, of course, is that nothing that’s followed has been boring, and I’m not talking fast. I guess that’s what makes me – how do I put this modestly? – better.

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          So here’s a story to grab your interest. A long time ago, easily dated from my older daughter’s first birthday, Ruth visited Madison to talk about entomology – the topic was either hoverflies or a sort of creature she discusses in the opening of Chapter 10 of LTOBC that she calls Theaetetus flies – and after the talk, which might unfairly and dishonestly be characterized as something of a disaster, Ruth crashed a reception in my home that I had intended to throw in my honor, and then proceeded to monopolize the guests’ attention. Despite my reminders to one and all that Ruth’s views were well-known, influential, and easily available (if not accessible), people continued to treat her as something of a novelty – as someone they’d prefer to talk to even though my own views were not so well-known, hardly influential, and available only if you plied me with gin. Oh, how the tables have turned, I’d like to say.

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          But back to my story. There was Ruth, in my house, hogging the guests, grabbing the glory, acting all nice and “yes, that’s certainly a good question-y.” Of course, I had to put an end to this exhibition of ugly graciousness. Knowing well Ruth’s reputation as a woman who had put her own children ahead of philosophical ambition, it occurred to me that she might be willing to put someone else’s child ahead of philosophical conversation. So, I lunged for the baby in my wife’s arms, on the assumption that it was my baby, or at least not Ruth’s, and, holding her high in the air like I was Kunta Kinte, I shouted across the room, “Ruth, not only does Theaetetus fly, but so does,” and here I had to pause, not sure of the name of the child in my arms, “this person.” I feel quite confident that my assertion confirmed Ruth’s suspicions about indexicals, namely, and I quote, that “an indexical sentence has as a relational proper function to produce something that bears a certain relation to something outside the sentence as well as to the rest of the sentence” (p. 162). In this case, the thing outside the sentence was my alleged daughter, now flying towards Ruth, who, quicker and more agile than Dennett’s denials of instrumentalism, dropped her glass of buttermilk on the floor and caught my offspring, who was only too delighted to find herself in the arms of anyone else.

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          I mention this story not to give Ruth a human face. She already has one of those, assuming I can at this moment trust my face recognition module, which, because I inherited it from my parents, along with a rather large nose and a shortage of foreskin, has acquired the proper function of detecting faces. But this mention of proper function brings me, finally, to the point. When Ruth speaks of proper functions, just what the hell is she talking about?

One way to sneak up on an answer to this foundational question is to consider a contrast class. Compare proper functions with improper ones. An improper function is sure to include lots of loud, drunk, British soccer fans who will turn on their hosts just as soon as the taps run dry. We can surmise, then, that a proper function is one involving formal wear, champagne toasts, leaded crystal, and maybe even cucumber sandwiches. However, this reasonable conjecture seems not to receive much support in the Book of Ruth. Here’s her version of a proper function:

m has the function F as a proper function iff:

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1. Ancestors of m did a lot of F-ing.

2. The F-ing that m’s ancestors did was done with their Cs.

3. Among the good explanations for why m is here today is that m’s parents spent a lot of time F-ing with their Cs

 

As you take in this analysis, keep in mind that this is what Ruth calls a proper function. It’s no wonder that you can’t find Ruth’s book on the shelves of small-town libraries. I might also note that Stanley Kubrick, who once confided in me his passion for proper functions, released Eyes Wide Shut not long after the appearance of LTOBC. Coincidence? Not on your C.

So, in sum, Ruth has a lot to answer for. Sure, she founded an industry of teleosemantics that has managed to keep Karen Neander quite busy for a while now. And, yes, she’s made some contributions to our understanding of concept development in her aptly titled Clearly Confusing Ideas. But, as far as I’m concerned, Ruth’s greatest achievement remains that catch she made on a cold night, long ago, in Madison, Wisconsin. Whenever my daughter, now in high school, asks me to tell her one more time the story of Auntie Ruthie and her big, soft hands, I tell her to shut up and keep away from proper functions.