A Diatribe on Jerry Fodor's the Mind Doesn't Work That Way1
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Mind and World: Beyond the Externalism/Internalism Debate
Research Proposal Mind and World: Beyond the Externalism/Internalism Debate Sanjit Chakraborty Research Scholar Department of Philosophy Jadavpur University Background For the last few years the concept of the natural kind terms has haunted me. My main concern has been regarding the location of the meaning of these terms. Are meanings of the natural kind terms in the head or in the world? This question has been the most pressing in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language. I have realized that we cannot separate mind from the world. I had in the beginning only a layman‟s conception regarding mind, meaning and the world. When I entered the field of philosophy inspired by Hilary Putnam, I found that semantic externalism is a vexing issue involving a vast area. The location of content is at the core of the metaphysical debate regarding internalism and externalism in the sense that internalists believe that mental proprieties are intrinsic only if they preserve across world identity of internal replicas. Externalism is opposed to this thinking. For externalists, mental properties are in many cases dependent on physical or social environment. The linguistic strategy also maintains a difference between internalism and externalism regarding the mental content. Descriptivism focuses on general terms that consist in descriptive content and leads to mode of presentation of reference through sense. Besides, the causal theory of reference refutes descriptivism to ensure that there is a causal chain of reference between words and 1 objects that help us to identify agent‟s thought through an identification of its relation with external environment. -
17. Idealism, Or Something Near Enough Susan Schneider (In
17. Idealism, or Something Near Enough Susan Schneider (In Pearce and Goldsmidt, OUP, in press.) Some observations: 1. Mathematical entities do not come for free. There is a field, philosophy of mathematics, and it studies their nature. In this domain, many theories of the nature of mathematical entities require ontological commitments (e.g., Platonism). 2. Fundamental physics (e.g., string theory, quantum mechanics) is highly mathematical. Mathematical entities purport to be abstract—they purport to be non-spatial, atemporal, immutable, acausal and non-mental. (Whether they truly are abstract is a matter of debate, of course.) 3. Physicalism, to a first approximation, holds that everything is physical, or is composed of physical entities. 1 As such, physicalism is a metaphysical hypothesis about the fundamental nature of reality. In Section 1 of this paper, I urge that it is reasonable to ask the physicalist to inquire into the nature of mathematical entities, for they are doing heavy lifting in the physicalist’s approach, describing and identifying the fundamental physical entities that everything that exists is said to reduce to (supervene on, etc.). I then ask whether the physicalist in fact has the resources to provide a satisfying account of the nature of these mathematical entities, given existing work in philosophy of mathematics on nominalism and Platonism that she would likely draw from. And the answer will be: she does not. I then argue that this deflates the physicalist program, in significant ways: physicalism lacks the traditional advantages of being the most economical theory, and having a superior story about mental causation, relative to competing theories. -
Comment Attachment
Nuriel Moghavem, MD University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA [email protected] Victor W. Henderson, MD Stanford University, Stanford, CA Michael D. Greicius, MD, MPH Stanford University, Stanford, CA Disclosure: Dr. Greicius is a co-founder and share-holder of SBGneuro Chrysa Cheronis, MD Stanford University Medical Center, Palo Alto, CA Wesley Kerr, MD, PhD University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Alberto Espay, MD University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center, Cincinnati, OH Daniel O. Claassen MD Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN Bruce T. Adornato MD Adjunct Clinical Professor of Neurology, Palo Alto, CA Roger L. Albin, MD University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI R. Ryan Darby, MD Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN Graham Garrison, MD University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio Lina Chervak, MD University of Cincinnati Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH Abhimanyu Mahajan, MD, MHS Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL Richard Mayeux, MD Columbia University, New York, NY Lon Schneider MD Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CAv Sami Barmada, MD PhD University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Evan Seevak, MD Alameda Health System, Oakland, CA Will Mantyh MD University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN Bryan M. Spann, DO, PhD Consultant, Cognitive and Neurobehavior Disorders, Scottsdale, AZ Kevin Duque, MD University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH Lealani Mae Acosta, MD, MPH Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN Marie Adachi, MD Alameda Health System, Oakland, CA Marina Martin, MD, MPH Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA Matthew Schrag MD, PhD Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN Matthew L. Flaherty, MD University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH Stephanie Reyes, MD Durham, NC Hani Kushlaf, MD University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH David B Clifford, MD Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, Missouri Marc Diamond, MD UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX Disclosure: Dr. -
Kedwards CV Inprogress.Pages
Philosophy Department 541 Hall of Languages Syracuse University Syracuse, NY 13244-1170 [email protected] Kevan Edwards 31 5-416-2700 (cell) ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS 2008 - Assistant Professor, Syracuse University 2006-2008 Assistant Professor, University of Kansas EDUCATION 2000-2006 Ph.D. in Philosophy, Rutgers University, October 2006 2000 B.A., Specialist in Philosophy, with high distinction, University of Toronto DISSERTATION Oct. 2006 Referentialism without Compromise: Semantics at the Intersection of Mind and Language Committee: Jerry Fodor, Barry Loewer, Stephen Neale, Georges Rey PUBLICATIONS 2014 "Keeping (Direct) Reference in Mind". Noûs 48(2), pp. 342-367. 2013 “Concepts”. Oxford Bibliographies (published online Sept. 30, 2013) http:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195396577/ obo-9780195396577-0220.xml 2012 “Review of ‘The Extended Mind’, Edited by Richard Menary.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy: 1-3. 2011 “Higher-level Concepts and Their Heterogeneous Implementations: A Polemical Response to Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts”. Philosophical Psychology, 24(1), 119-133. 2010 “Review of David Thompson, Daniel Dennett”. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20167. 2010 “Unity Amidst Heterogeneity in Theories of Concepts”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 210-211. [Commentary on Machery, Doing Without Concepts (OUP)] 2010 “Concept Referentialism and the Role of Empty Concepts”. Mind & Language, 25(1), 89-118. !1 of !6 2009 “Referring When Push Comes to Shove”. In New Waves in the Philosophy of Language (pp. 60-86). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009 “What Concepts Do”. Synthese, 170(2), 289-310. PRESENTATIONS / COMMENTS / CHAIRED SESSIONS 2014 “The Concept of a Concept, in Philosophy, Psychology, and (Hopefully) Beyond. -
Review of Jerry Fodor, the Mind Doesn't Work That Way
The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (review) Ray Jackendoff Language, Volume 78, Number 1, March 2002, pp. 164-170 (Review) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2002.0024 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/19286 [ Access provided at 10 May 2020 20:12 GMT from Linguistic Society of America ] 164 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 78, NUMBER 1 (2002) malist studies as the brief summary of the chapters has hopefully shown. All articles complement the work of the festschrift’s honoree, are well-written, and contain interesting data as well as intriguing analyses, pushing the minimalist spirit further ahead. REFERENCES BOSˇKOVIC´,Zˇ ELJKO. 1994. D-structure, theta-criterion, and movement into theta-positions. Linguistic Analysis 24.247–86. MM. 1997. Superiority effects with multiple wh-fronting in Serbo-Croatian. Lingua 102.1–20. CHOMSKY,NOAM. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MM. 2001. Derivation by phase. Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. GRIMSHAW,JANE, and ARMIN MESTER. 1988. Light verbs and -marking. Linguistic Inquiry 19.205–32. HORNSTEIN,NORBERT. 1995. Logical form: From GB to minimalism. Oxford: Blackwell. KAYNE,RICHARD S. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ZAS Ja¨gerstr. 10–11 10117 Berlin Germany [[email protected]] The mind doesn’t work that way: Thescopeand limits of computational psychology. By JERRY FODOR. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. 126. Reviewed by RAY JACKENDOFF, Brandeis University* As has been his wont in recent years, Jerry Fodor offers here a statement of deepest pessimism about the possibility of doing cognitive science except in a very limited class of subdomains. -
Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality, by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig
446 Book Reviews claim that should be accepted independently of whatever moral fiction one accepts. At any rate, all those who accept any moral fiction whatsoever should also accept the impermissibility of intransigence. Now, this is starting to look Downloaded from suspiciously like a fiction-independent moral truth. And if there is one such, why not more? Indeed, if there are any substantive constraints on acceptable moral fictions then there will inevitably be substantive moral propositions that are true in all allowable fictions. But then fictionalism is starting to look a bit like good old-fashioned moral realism. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ Moral Fictionalism is not an easy read. This is partly, but not entirely, a function of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and the novelty of Kal- deron’s position. But it is also a function of the fundamental tension implicit in fictionalism: of wanting to take morality seriously, but not being quite able to do so. In Kalderon’s hands, this plays out as the conflict between the imper- sonal and absolute authority of morality and the permissibility of a personal and recalcitrant moral intransigence. The book starts out by boldly affirming both and drawing some remarkable consequences, but it ends up, somewhat uneasily, affirming authority and retracting intransigence. In spite of this at Indiana University Libraries Technical Services/Serials Acquisitions on October 6, 2014 uneasy resting place, Kalderon advances the field in two important ways. Firstly, in combining factualism with non-cognitivism he carves out a radically new version of hermeneutic fictionalism. Secondly, his account focuses an interesting new light on the nature of non-cognitivism and that cluster of arguments directed against non-cognitivism known as the Frege-Geach objec- tion. -
Generics Analysis Canberra Plan.Pdf
Philosophical Perspectives, 26, Philosophy of Mind, 2012 CONCEPTS, ANALYSIS, GENERICS AND THE CANBERRA PLAN1 Mark Johnston Princeton University Sarah-Jane Leslie2 Princeton University My objection to meanings in the theory of meaning is not that they are abstract or that their identity conditions are obscure, but that they have no demonstrated use.3 —Donald Davidson “Truth and Meaning” From time to time it is said that defenders of conceptual analysis would do well to peruse the best empirically supported psychological theories of concepts, and then tailor their notions of conceptual analysis to those theories of what concepts are.4 As against this, there is an observation — traceable at least as far back to Gottlob Frege’s attack on psychologism in “The Thought” — that might well discourage philosophers from spending a week or two with the empirical psychological literature. The psychological literature is fundamentally concerned with mental representations, with the mental processes of using these in classification, characterization and inference, and with the sub-personal bases of these processes. The problem is that for many philosophers, concepts could not be mental items. (Jerry Fodor is a notable exception, we discuss him below.) We would like to set out this difference of focus in some detail and then propose a sort of translation manual, or at least a crucial translational hint, one which helps in moving between philosophical and psychological treatments of concepts. Then we will consider just how, given the translation, the relevant -
Jerry Fodor · Why Pigs Don't Have Wings: the Case Against Natural Selection
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. (More Information) × LOG IN REGISTER FOR ONLINE ACCESS Search the LRB LATEST ARCHIVE BOOKSHOP CONTACT US ABOUT THE LRB SUBSCRIBE INTRODUCTION BACK ISSUES CONTRIBUTORS CATEGORIES LETTERS AUDIO VIDEO Vol. 29 No. 20 · 18 October 2007 facebook214 twitter 14 share email letter cite print pages 19-22 | 5138 words ‘We are larger | smaller now at our Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings most unequal Jerry Fodor since 1940’ You are invited to read this free essay from the London Review of Books. Ben Rawlence Register for free and enjoy 24 hours of access to the entire LRB archive @ LRB blog Jerry Fodor has of over 12,500 essays and reviews. almost finished a book, with Zenon Pylyshyn, Die Meistersinger is, by Wagner’s standards, quite a cheerful opera. The action turns on comedy’s staple, the marriage plot: get the hero and the heroine safely and truly wed about the semantics of with at least a presumption of happiness ever after. There are cross-currents and mental representation. undercurrents that make Meistersinger’s libretto subtle in ways that the librettos of He teaches at Rutgers. operas usually aren’t. But for once Nietzsche is nowhere in sight and nobody dies; the territory is closer to The Barber of Seville than to The Ring. Yet, in the first scene of Act 3, the avuncular Hans Sachs, whose benevolent interventions smooth the lovers’ MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR course, delivers an aria of bitter reflection on the human condition. -
Ronald Endicott, “Multiple Realizability” (Final Draft) Forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2Nd Edition, Macmillan Press, 2005
Ronald Endicott, “Multiple Realizability” (Final Draft) Forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, MacMillan Press, 2005 Multiple realizability is a key issue in debates over the nature of mind and reduction in the sciences. The subject consists of two parts: “multiplicity” and “realizability.” “Multiplicity” designates a kind of variability in the mechanism and materials from which a particular type of thing can be made. “Realizability” designates a specific relation that exists when there is the stated variability. Realizability Apart from the broad folk notion of realization meaning that a thing is “made real,” philosophers apply several technical notions to paradigm cases such computational states realized by engineering states, minds realized by brains, and persons realized by their bodies. The technical notions fall into three broad traditions: “mathematical,” “logico- semantic,” and “metaphysical.” The mathematical tradition equates realization with a form of mapping between objects. Generally speaking, x mathematically realizes y because elements of y map onto elements of x. The notion is useful for many purposes, for example, when constructing a formal model of a particular domain. However, since mapping extends to models as well as reality, it fails to distinguish between “simulated” versus “genuine” realizations. Heavenly stars can be mapped onto grains of sand, but grains of sand do not realize heavenly stars in any genuine sense. Similarly, the mental states described by a cognitive program can be mapped onto unthinking groups of things, but unthinking groups of things do not realize mental states in any genuine sense (Block, 1978). Hence, to capture what is essential to genuine realization, William Lycan (1987) adds ideas about evolutionary function, while David Chalmers (1994) emphasizes facts about causal structure. -
Living in a Matrix, She Thinks to Herself
y most accounts, Susan Schneider lives a pretty normal life. BAn assistant professor of LIVING IN philosophy, she teaches classes, writes academic papers and A MATrix travels occasionally to speak at a philosophy or science lecture. At home, she shuttles her daughter to play dates, cooks dinner A PHILOSOPHY and goes mountain biking. ProfESSor’S LifE in Then suddenly, right in the middle of this ordinary American A WEB OF QUESTIONS existence, it happens. Maybe we’re all living in a Matrix, she thinks to herself. It’s like in the by Peter Nichols movie when the question, What is the Matrix? keeps popping up on Neo’s computer screen and sets him to wondering. Schneider starts considering all the what-ifs and the maybes that now pop up all around her. Maybe the warm sun on my face, the trees swishing by and the car I’m driving down the road are actually code streaming through the circuits of a great computer. What if this world, which feels so compellingly real, is only a simulation thrown up by a complex and clever computer game? If I’m in it, how could I even know? What if my real- seeming self is nothing more than an algorithm on a computational network? What if everything is a computer-generated dream world – a momentary assemblage of information clicking and switching and running away on a grid laid down by some advanced but unknown intelligence? It’s like that time, after earning an economics degree as an undergrad at Berkeley, she suddenly switched to philosophy. -
Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental States
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 811–833 www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa Functionalism, computationalism, and mental states Gualtiero Piccinini Department of Philosophy, Washington University, Campus Box 1073, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA Received 25 November 2003; received in revised form 24 February 2004 Abstract Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional rela- tions between them, we should reject these assumptions. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Functionalism; Computationalism; Computational functionalism; Mental states; Computa- tional theory of mind; Functional analysis 1. Introduction Particularly striking in retrospect was the widespread failure to distinguish the computational program in psychology from the functionalist program in meta- physics . (For an instance where the two are run together, see Fodor 1968[b]). (Fodor, 2000, p. 105 n. 4) Fodor is right: some philosophers of mind have conflated functionalism and computationalism about mental states. To a first approximation, functionalism is the metaphysical view that mental states are individuated by their functional rela- tions with mental inputs, outputs, and other mental states. Functionalism per se is E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Piccinini). 0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2004.02.003 812 G.Piccinini / Stud.Hist.Phil.Sci.35 (2004) 811–833 neutral on how those functional relations should be characterized. -
Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel
Empiricism, Cognitive Science, and the Novel Jonathan Kramnick Rutgers University “I see into minds, you see,” the robot continued, “and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can’t begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them—but I try, and your novels help.” —Isaac Asimov, Liar! No one literary form has a proprietary stake in the mind, but as genres go the novel has since its inception taken remarkable interest in mental states. Among other things, eighteenth-century fiction is so much writing about the mind: about how thoughts represent things, cause other thoughts to happen, or lead to actions. The same might be said for empiricism. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy paid unusual attention to the content of minds and the nature of ideas, to “human understanding” as Locke and Hume put it. While the connection between empiricism and the rise of the novel is a touch- stone of literary studies, with a venerable tradition of scholarship dating back to the beginnings of the profession, only recently have critics drawn upon phi- losophy of mind and cognitive science to talk about the way in which thinking takes shape in particular works from the period.1 This is of course not so much of a surprise, since criticism is as a rule skeptical of framing older texts with present-day models. The risk is one of anachronism or universalism, either shoehorning recalcitrant descriptions of the mind into our current language of cognition or locating both within a timeless and unchanging account of the psyche.