Millikan vs. Millikan: biosemantics and the role of the consumer

Abstract Millikan’s biosemantics is commonly characterized as a “consumer theory” of representational content. Proponents of this characterization interpret Millikan as privileging representation consumers over representation producers in her account of content determination. However, Millikan herself rejects this interpretation and claims to give producers and consumers equal weight in her theory. In this paper, I propose to resolve this issue by arguing that there are actually two Millikanian theories of content, a consumer theory that is explicitly formulated in her earlier work and a significantly different, “hybrid” theory that is implicitly presupposed in much of her later work. This result is not only of exegetical value, but also of great systematic interest, since both theories turn out to be interesting proposals in their own right that face significantly different tasks and challenges.