Cover not available

Article published In: What can metacognition teach us about the evolution of communication?
Edited by Joëlle Proust
[Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 5:1] 2023
► pp. 79–101

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Millikan’s consistency testers and the cultural evolution of concepts

 | University of London
Published online: 7 July 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/elt.00048.she
Abstract
Ruth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future.
If human cognition does indeed include such a capacity, its operation will be an important determinant of how people use concepts. It will have a major impact on which concepts they deploy and which means of application (conceptions) they rely on. Since consistency testers are a selection mechanism at the heart of conceptual thinking, they would be crucial to understanding how concepts are selected  – why some are retained and proliferate and others die out. Hence, whether consistency testers for concepts exist, and how they operate, is an important question for those seeking to understand the cultural evolution of concepts, and of the words we use to express them.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Millikan’s hypothesis
  • 3.Consistency testers characterised
  • 4.Metacognitive role
  • 5.Objections
  • 6.Evidence
  • 7.Role in the evolution of concepts and language
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
References
Ackerman, R., & Thompson, V. A. (2017). Meta-Reasoning: Monitoring and Control of Thinking and Reasoning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 211, 607–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Astuti, R., & Harris, P. L. (2008). Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science, 321, 713–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: O.U.P.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Doyle, M. E., & Hourihan, K. L. (2016). Metacognitive Monitoring During Category Learning: How Success Affects Future Behaviour. Memory, 241, 1197–207. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eglington, L. G., & Kang, S. H. K. (2017). Interleaved Presentation Benefits Science Category Learning. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 61, 475–85. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eslami, SM Ali, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Frederic Besse, Fabio Viola, Ari S Morcos, Marta Garnelo, Avraham Ruderman, Andrei A Rusu, Ivo Danihelka, and Karol Gregor. 2018. Neural scene representation and rendering. Science, 360 (6394), 1204–1210. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernandez Cruz, A. L., Arango-Munoz, S. & Volz, K. G. (2016). Oops, Scratch That! Monitoring One’s Own Errors During Mental Calculation. Cognition, 1461, 110–20. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friston, K. J., & Stephan, K. E. (2007). Free-Energy and the Brain. Synthese, 1591, 417–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2013). Signals, Icons, and Beliefs. In D. Ryder, J. Kingsbury & K. Williford (Eds.), Millikan and Her Critics (pp. 41–58). Oxford / Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guilbeault, D., Baronchelli, A., & Centola, D. (2021). Experimental Evidence for Scale-Induced Category Convergence across Populations. Nature Communications, 121, 327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hamm, J. P., Johnson, B. W., & Kirk, I. J. (2002). Comparison of the N300 and N400 Erps to Picture Stimuli in Congruent and Incongruent Contexts. Clinical neurophysiology, 1131, 1339–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hartwig, M. K., & Dunlosky, J. (2017). Category Learning Judgments in the Classroom: Can Students Judge How Well They Know Course Topics? Contemporary Educational Psychology, 491, 80–90. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacoby, L. L., Wahlheim, C. N., & Coane, J. H. (2010). Test-Enhanced Learning of Natural Concepts: Effects on Recognition Memory, Classification, and Metacognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 361, 1441.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O., Tunyasuvunakool, K., Bates, R., Žídek, A., & Potapenko, A. (2021). Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with Alphafold. Nature, 596(7873), 583–589. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Koriat, A. (1997). Monitoring One’s Own Knowledge During Study: A Cue-Utilization Approach to Judgments of Learning. Journal of Experimental psychology: General, 1261, 349. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011). Subjective Confidence in Perceptual Judgments: A Test of the Self-Consistency Model. Journal of Experimental psychology: General, 1401:, 117–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012a). The Self-Consistency Model of Subjective Confidence. Psychological Review, 1191, 80–113. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012b). The Subjective Confidence in One’s Knowledge and Judgments: Some Metatheoretical Considerations. In M. J. Beran, J. L. Brandl, J. Perner, & J. Proust (Eds.), The Foundations of Metacognition (pp. 213–33). Oxford / New York: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012c). The Relationships between Monitoring, Regulation and Performance. Learning and Instruction, 221, 296–98. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2008). Learning Concepts and Categories: Is Spacing the “Enemy of Induction”? Psychological Science, 191. 585–92. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kornell, N., Castel, A. D., Eich, T. S., & Bjork, R. A. (2010). Spacing as the Friend of Both Memory and Induction in Young and Older Adults. Psychology and aging, 251, 498. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krizhevsky, Alex, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E Hinton. 2012. Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, edited by F. Pereira, C.J.C. Burges, L. Bottou and K.Q. Weinberger, 1097–1105. New York: Curran Associates, Inc.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2011). Thirty Years and Counting: Finding Meaning in the N400 Component of the Event-Related Brain Potential (Erp). Annual review of psychology, 621, 621–47. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Legare, C. H., & Shtulman, A. (2018). Explanatory Pluralism across Cultures and Development. In J. Proust & M. Fortier (Eds.), Metacogntive Diverisity: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martinez, M. (2013). Teleosemantics and Productivity. Philosophical Psychology, 261, 47–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1989). Biosemantics. Journal of Philosophy, 861, 281–97. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2000). On Clear and Confused Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information. Oxford / New York: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2022). Self-Signs and Intensional Contexts. Mind & Language: 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J. & Foster, N. L. (2017). Do People Use Category-Learning Judgments to Regulate Their Learning of Natural Categories? Memory & Cognition, 451, 1253–69. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nelson, T. O., & Narens, L. (1990). Metamemory: A Theoretical Framework and New Findings. In M. Bowerman (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 125–73). Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, Inc..Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Polich, J. (2007). Updating P300: An Integrative Theory of P3a and P3b. Clinical neurophysiology, 1181, 2128–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Proust, J. (2008). Epistemic Agency and Metacognition: An Externalist View. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1081, 241–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012a). The Norms of Acceptance. Philosophical Issues, 221, 316–33. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012b). Metacognition and Mindreading: One or Two Functions? In M. J. Beran, J. L. Brandl, J. Perner & J. Proust (Eds.), Foundations of Metacognition (pp. 234–51). Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013a). The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness. Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2013b). “Mental Acts as Natural Kinds”. In Vierkant, ed, Decomposing the Will. Oxford / New York: OUP, 262–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rawson, K. A., Thomas, R. C., & Jacoby, L. L. (2015). The Power of Examples: Illustrative Examples Enhance Conceptual Learning of Declarative Concepts. Educational Psychology Review, 271, 483–504. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rupert, R. D. (1999). Mental Representations and Millikan’s Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality? The Southern journal of philosophy, 371, 113–40. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shea, N. (in submission). Metacognition of Inferential Transitions.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sperber, D., Clement, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., & Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic Vigilance. Mind & Language, 251, 359–93. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, V. A., & Johnson, S. C. (2014). Conflict, Metacognition, and Analytic Thinking. Thinking & Reasoning, 201, 215–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thorne, S. R., Quilty-Dunn, J., Smortchkova, J., Shea, N., & Hampton, J. A. (2021). Concept Appraisal. Cognitive Science, 451, e12978. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thorne, S. R., Smortchkova, J., Quilty-Dunn, J., Shea, N., & Hampton, J. A. (2022). Is Concept Appraisal Modulated by Procedural or Declarative Manipulations? Frontiers in Psychology, 131, 774629. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wahlheim, C. N., Dunlosky, J. & Jacoby, L. L. (2011). Spacing Enhances the Learning of Natural Concepts: An Investigation of Mechanisms, Metacognition, and Aging. Memory & Cognition, 391, 750–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wahlheim, C. N., Finn, B. & Jacoby, L. L. (2012). Metacognitive Judgments of Repetition and Variability Effects in Natural Concept Learning: Evidence for Variability Neglect. Memory and Cognition, 401, 703–16. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Yan, V. X., Ligon Bjork, E. & Bjork, R. A. (2016). On the Difficulty of Mending Metacognitive Illusions: A Priori Theories, Fluency Effects, and Misattributions of the Interleaving Benefit. Journal of Experimental psychology: General, 1451, 918. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Proust, Joëlle
2024. Affordances from a control viewpoint. Philosophical Psychology 37:7 ► pp. 1590 ff. DOI logo
Shea, Nicholas
2024. Concepts at the Interface, DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue