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| 2474 | It seems likely that analysis of concepts is impossible, but justification can survive without it |
| Full Idea: Lots of philosophers fear that if concepts don't have analyses, justification breaks down. My own guess is that concepts don't have analyses and that justification will survive all the same. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3 n2) |
| 2481 | Despite all the efforts of philosophers, nothing can ever be reduced to anything |
| Full Idea: The general truth is that nothing ever reduces to anything, however hard philosophers may try. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) |
| 2505 | Turing invented the idea of mechanical rationality (just based on syntax) |
| Full Idea: The most important thing that has happened in cognitive science was Turing's invention of the notion of mechanical rationality (because some inferences are rational in virtue of the syntax of their sentences). | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) |
| 2470 | Transcendental arguments move from knowing Q to knowing P because it depends on Q |
| Full Idea: Transcendental arguments ran: "If it weren't that P, we couldn't know (now 'say' or 'think' or 'judge') that Q; and we do know (now…) that Q; therefore P". Old and new arguments tend to be equally unconvincing, because of their empiricist preconceptions. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) |
| 2469 | The world is full of messy small things producing stable large-scale properties (e.g. mountains) |
| Full Idea: Damn near everything we know about the world (e.g. a mountain) suggests that unimaginably complicated to-ings and fro-ings of bits and pieces at the extreme microlevel manage somehow to converge on stable macrolevel properties. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |||
| A reaction: This is clearly true, and is a vital part of the physicalist picture of the mind. Personally I prefer the word 'processes' to 'properties', since no one seems to really know what a property is. A process is an abstraction from events. |
| 2475 | Don't define something by a good instance of it; a good example is a special case of the ordinary example |
| Full Idea: It's a mistake to try to construe the notion of an instance in terms of the notion of a good instance (e.g. Platonic Forms); the latter is patently a special case of the former, so the right order of exposition is the other way round. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 4) |
| 2502 | How do you count beliefs? |
| Full Idea: There is no agreed way of counting beliefs. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.16) |
| 2501 | Berkeley seems to have mistakenly thought that chairs are the same as after-images |
| Full Idea: Berkeley seems to have believed that tables and chairs are logically homogeneous with afterimages. I assume that he was wrong to believe this. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.16) |
| 2465 | Maybe explaining the mechanics of perception will explain the concepts involved |
| Full Idea: Why mightn't fleshing out the standard psychological account of perception itself count as learning what perceptual justification amounts to? | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 1) |
| 2504 | Rationalism can be based on an evolved computational brain with innate structure |
| Full Idea: Pinker's rationalism involves four main ideas: mind is a computational system, which is massively modular with a lot of innate structure resulting from evolution. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) |
| 2493 | According to empiricists abstraction is the fundamental mental process |
| Full Idea: According to empiricists, the fundamental mental process is not theory construction but abstraction. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2494 | Rationalists say there is more to a concept than the experience that prompts it |
| Full Idea: That there is more in the content of a concept than there is in the experiences that prompt us to form it is the burden of the traditional rationalist critique of empiricism (as worked out by Leibniz and Kant). | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2508 | The function of a mind is obvious |
| Full Idea: Like hands, you don't have to know how the mind evolved to make a pretty shrewd guess at what it's for; for example, that it's to think with. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |||
| A reaction: I like this. This is one of the basic facts of philosophy of mind, and it frequently gets lost in the fog. It is obvious that the components of the mind (say, experience and intentionality) will be better understood if their function is remembered. |
| 2503 | Empirical approaches see mind connections as mirrors/maps of reality |
| Full Idea: Empirical approaches to cognition say the human mind is a blank slate at birth; experiences write on the slate, and association extracts and extrapolates trends from the record of experience. The mind is an image of statistical regularities of the world. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |||
| A reaction: The 'blank slate' is an exaggeration. The mind at least has the tools to make associations. He tries to make it sound implausible, but the word 'extrapolates' contains a wealth of possibilities that could build into a plausible theory. |
| 2485 | Do intentional states explain our behaviour? |
| Full Idea: Intentional Realism is the idea that our intentional mental states causally explain our behaviour; so holistic semantics (which says no two people have the same intentional states, or share generalisations) is irrealistic about intentional mental states. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: ...presumably because two people CAN have the same behaviour. The key question would be whether the intentional states have to be conscious. |
| 2506 | If I have a set of mental modules, someone had better be in charge of them! |
| Full Idea: If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |||
| A reaction: Dennett quotes this as a quaintly old-fashioned view. I agree quite strongly with Fodor, for reasons that Dennett should like - evolutionary ones. A mind is a useless tool without central co-ordination. What makes my long-term plans? It isn't anarchy! |
| 2467 | Functionalists see pains as properties involving relations and causation |
| Full Idea: Functionalists claim that pains and the like are higher-order, relational properties that things have in virtue of the pattern of causal interactions that they (can or do) enter into. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |||
| A reaction: The whole idea of a property being purely 'relational' strikes me as dubious (or even nonsense). "Is north of" is a relation, but it is totally derived from more basical physical geographical properties. |
| 2489 | Why bother with neurons? You don't explain bird flight by examining feathers |
| Full Idea: Compare Churchland's strategy rooted in neurological modelling with "if it's flight you want to understand, what you need to look at is feathers". | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 8) | |||
| A reaction: Sounds good, but may be a false analogy. You learn a lot about snake movement if you examine their scales. |
| 2468 | Type physicalism is a stronger claim than token physicalism |
| Full Idea: "Type" physicalism is supposed, by general consensus, to be stronger than "token" physicalism; stronger, that is, than the mere claim that all mental states are necessarily physically instantiated. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 2) | |||
| A reaction: Such philosopher's terminology always seems cut-and-dried, until you ask exactly what is identical to what. The word 'type' is a very broad concept. Are trees the same type of thing as roses? A thought always requires the same 'type' of brain event? |
| 2490 | Modern connectionism is just Hume's theory of the 'association' of 'ideas' |
| Full Idea: Churchland is pushing a version of connectionism ….in which if you think of the elements as "ideas" and call the connections between them "associations", you've got a psychology that is no great advance on David Hume. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 8) | |||
| A reaction: See Fodor's book 'Humean Variations' on how Hume should be improved. This idea strikes me as important for understanding Hume, who is very reticent about what his real views are on the mind. |
| 2476 | The goal of thought is to understand the world, not instantly sort it into conceptual categories |
| Full Idea: The question whether there are recognitional concepts is really the question what thought is for - for directing action, or for discerning truth. And Descartes was right on this: the goal of thought is to understand the world, not to sort it. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 4) |
| 2500 | Babies talk in consistent patterns |
| Full Idea: "Who Mummy love?" is recognizably baby talk; but "love Mummy who?" is not. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.14) | |||
| A reaction: Not convincing. If she is embracing Daddy, and asking baby, she might get the answer "Daddy", after a bit of coaxing. Who knows what babies up the Amazon respond to? |
| 2507 | Rationality rises above modules |
| Full Idea: Probably, modular computation doesn't explain how minds are rational; it's just a sort of precursor. You work through it to get a view of how horribly hard our rationality is to understand. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |||
| A reaction: The choice is between a Self which weighs and judges the inputs, or merely decisions that automatically result from the balance of inputs. The latter seems unlikely. Vetoes are essential. |
| 2491 | Modules have encapsulation, inaccessibility, private concepts, innateness |
| Full Idea: The four essential properties of modules are: encapsulation (information doesn't flow, as in the persistence of illusions); inaccessibility (unreportable); domain specificity (they have private concepts); innateness (genetically preprogrammed). | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.11) | |||
| A reaction: If they have no information flow, and are unreportable and private, this makes empirical testing of Fodor's hypothesis a little tricky. He must be on to something, though. |
| 2497 | Something must take an overview of the modules |
| Full Idea: It is not plausible that the mind could be made only of modules; one does sometimes manage to balance one's checkbook, and there can't be an innate, specialized intelligence for doing that. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |||
| A reaction: I agree strongly with this. My own mind strikes me as being highly modular, but as long as I am aware of the output of the modules, I can pass judgement. The judger is more than a 'module'. |
| 2495 | Obvious modules are language and commonsense explanation |
| Full Idea: The best candidates for the status of mental modules are language (the first one, put there by Chomsky), commonsense biology, commonsense physics, commonsense psychology, and aspects of visual form perception. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |||
| A reaction: My favourite higher level module is my Personal Assistant, who keeps nagging me to do sundry things, only some of which I agree to. It is an innate superego, but still a servant of the Self. |
| 2499 | Modules analyse stimuli, they don't tell you what to do |
| Full Idea: The thinking involved in "figuring out" what to do is a quite different kind of mental process than the stimulus analysis that modules perform. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |||
| A reaction: My PA theory fits this perfectly. My inner assistant keeps providing information about needs, duties etc., but takes no part in my decisions. Psychology must include the Will. |
| 2498 | Modules make the world manageable |
| Full Idea: Modules function to present the world to thought under descriptions that are germane to the success of behaviour. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |||
| A reaction: "Descriptions" might be a bold word to use about something so obscure, but this pinpoints the evolutionary nature of modularity theory, to which I subscribe. |
| 2496 | Blindness doesn't destroy spatial concepts |
| Full Idea: Blind children are not, in general, linguistically impaired; not even in their talk about space. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13) | |||
| A reaction: This is offered to demonstrate that spatial concepts are innate, even in the blind. But then we would expect anyone who has to move in space to develop spatial concepts from experience. |
| 2509 | Modules have in-built specialist information |
| Full Idea: Modules contain lots of specialized information about the problem domains that they compute in. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17) | |||
| A reaction: At this point we must be cautious about modularity. I doubt whether 'information' is the right word. I think 'specialized procedures' might make more sense. |
| 2480 | Language is ambiguous, but thought isn't |
| Full Idea: Thinking can't just be in sequences of English words since, notoriously, thought needs to be ambiguity-free in ways that mere word sequences are not. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: I think this is a strong argument in favour of (at least) propositions. Thoughts are unambiguous, but their expression need not be. Sentences could be expanded to achieve clarity. |
| 2483 | Mentalese doesn't require a theory of meaning |
| Full Idea: Mentalese doesn't need Grice's theory of natural-language meaning, or indeed any theory of natural-language meaning whatsoever. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: Presumably what is represented by mentalese is a quite separate question from whether there exists a mentalese that does some sort of representing. Sounds plausible. |
| 2487 | Mentalese may also incorporate some natural language |
| Full Idea: I don't think it is true that all thought is in Mentalese. It is quite likely (e.g. in arithmetic algorithms) that Mentalese co-opts bits of natural language. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: Presumably language itself would have to be coded in mentalese. If there is some other way for thought to work, the whole mind could use it, and skip mentalese. |
| 2486 | Content can't be causal role, because causal role is decided by content |
| Full Idea: Functional role semantics wants to analyze the content of a belief in terms of its inferential (causal) relations; but that seems the wrong way round. The content of a belief determines its causal role. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: This is one of my favourite ideas, which keeps coming to mind when considering functional accounts of mental life. The buck of explanation must, however, stop somewhere. |
| 2492 | Experience can't explain itself; the concepts needed must originate outside experience |
| Full Idea: Experience can't explain itself; eventually, some of the concepts that explaining experience requires have to come from outside it. Eventually, some of them have to be built in. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.12) |
| 2471 | Are concepts best seen as capacities? |
| Full Idea: Virtually all modern theorists about philosophy, mind or language tend to agree that concepts are capacities, in particular concepts are epistemic capacities. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |||
| A reaction: This view seems to describe concepts in functional terms, which generates my perennial question: what is it about concepts that enables them to fulfil that particular role? |
| 2472 | For Pragmatists having a concept means being able to do something |
| Full Idea: It's a paradigmatically Pragmatist idea that having a concept consists in being able to do something. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |||
| A reaction: If you defined a bicycle simply by what you could do with it, you wouldn't explain much. I wonder if pragmatism and functionalism come from the same intellectual stable? |
| 2482 | It seems unlikely that meaning can be reduced to communicative intentions, or any mental states |
| Full Idea: Nobody now thinks that the reduction of the meaning of English sentences to facts about the communicative intentions of English speakers - or to any facts about mental states - is likely to go through. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: Most attempts at 'reduction' of meaning seem to go rather badly. I assume it would be very difficult to characterise 'intentions' without implicit reference to meaning. |
| 2477 | If to understand "fish" you must know facts about them, where does that end? |
| Full Idea: If learning that fish typically live in streams is part of learning "fish", typical utterances of "pet fish" (living in bowls) are counterexamples. This argument iterates (e.g "big pet fish"). So learning where they live can't be part of learning "fish". | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 5) | |||
| A reaction: Using 'typical' twice is rather misleading here. Town folk can learn 'fish' as typically living in bowls. There is no one way to learn a word meaning. |
| 2473 | Analysis is impossible without the analytic/synthetic distinction |
| Full Idea: If there is no analytic/synthetic distinction then there are no analyses. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 3) | |||
| A reaction: There are no precise analyses. I see no reason why a holistic view of language prohibits the careful elucidation of key concepts in the system. It's just a bit fluid. |
| 2484 | The theory of the content of thought as 'Mentalese' explains why the Private Language Argument doesn't work |
| Full Idea: If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a Private Language Argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. | |||
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch. 6) | |||
| A reaction: Presumably Mentalese implies that all language is, in the first instance, intrinsically private. Dogs, for example, need Mentalese, since they self-evidently think. |