- 1 - Finding Order in our World :

We discuss neuroscientific and phenomenological arguments in support of Millikan’s thesis. Then we consider invariance as a unifying theme in perceptual and conceptual tracking, and how invariants may be extracted from the environment. Finally we consider some wider implications of Millikan’s nondescriptionist approach to language, with especial application to color terms. Since I am in substantial agreement with Millikan’s thesis, my commentary will explore connections between it and neural network theories of knowledge representation. First I will discuss neuroscientific and phenomenological arguments in support of the thesis. Then I will consider invariance as a unifying theme in perceptual and conceptual tracking, and how invariants may be extracted from the environment. Finally I will consider some wider implications of Millikan’s nondescriptionist approach to language, with especial application to color terms. The primacy of the concrete. In his Heideggerian critique of traditional (“symbolic”) cognitive science and artificial intelligence, Dreyfus (1979; 1982; 1991, pp. 115-121) pointed out the futility of trying to represent our skillful coping in the world in terms of atomic, abstract, context-free predicates. Even Husserl acknowledged the “huge concreteness” of this hypothetical abstract structure and called its phenomenological reduction an “infinite task” (see citations in Dreyfus 1982, p. 20). We may refer to this observation as the primacy of the concrete; that is, the world as ordinarily experienced * To appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.