Millikan on picturing and correspondence

Abstract

Ruth Millikan characterizes her account of truth as a pictorial theory inspired by Tractarian ideas of mapping and isomorphism. Given the well-known difficulties facing pictorial accounts of sentential truth, this characterization is puzzling. I argue that Millikan’s account is best developed without requiring relations of structural resemblance between sentences and reality. Focusing on her notion of semantic mapping functions and her later distinction between projected and substitutional correspondence, I suggest that the relations relevant to sentential truth are best characterized in terms of systematic correlation rather than resemblance. While some representational systems may involve genuinely projective relations, Millikan’s own treatment of natural-language sentences as governed primarily by substitutional rules points, despite her Tractarian rhetoric, toward a non-pictorial form of correspondence.