CONCEPT
Proper Function
Ruth Millikan’s foundational technical concept: the effect an item was selected to produce across a lineage of reproductions, which grounds all natural meaning and fixes the exact question a language model must answer to have content of its own.
A proper function is not what a thing usually does, nor what its designer intended, but what items of its type did in the past that explains why copies of them continue to exist.
Ruth Millikan introduced the concept in 1984 to naturalize
intentionality—to explain the
aboutness of mental and linguistic states without leaving the physical world. A heart’s proper function is to pump blood not because most hearts pump well but because pumping is why hearts proliferated across evolutionary lineages. A bee dance’s proper function is to direct foragers to nectar because directing-to-nectar is the effect that explains why bees dance. The concept is radical because it makes function, and therefore meaning, historical rather than intrinsic: a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of a heart with no evolutionary history has no proper function; it pumps, but pumping is not what it is
for. Applied to the signs inside
large language models, proper function becomes the decisive question: