74 ideas
| 12644 | Who cares what 'philosophy' is? Most pre-1950 thought doesn't now count as philosophy [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Who cares what gets called 'philosophy'? It's my impression that most of what happened in philosophy before 1950 wouldn't qualify according to the present usage. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: A rather breath-taking remark. Fodor is, of course, a devotee of David Hume, and of Descartes, but he never seems to refer to Greeks at all. Personally I presume that if you aren't doing what Plato and Aristotle were interested in, it ain't philosophy. |
| 12633 | Definitions often give necessary but not sufficient conditions for an extension [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Attempts to define a term frequently elicit necessary but not sufficient conditions for membership of its extension. This is called the 'X problem', as in 'kill' means 'cause to die' plus X. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1 n3) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is one of the great sceptics about definition. I just don't see why we have to have totally successful definitions before we can accept the process as a worthwhile endeavour. |
| 12664 | A truth-table, not inferential role, defines 'and' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I'm inclined to think that 'and' is defined by its truth-table (and not, for example, by its 'inferential-role'). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: Sounds right, on my general principle that something can only have a function if it has an intrinsic nature. The truth-table just formalises normal understanding of 'and', according to what it makes true. |
| 12648 | Names in thought afford a primitive way to bring John before the mind [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Names in thought (in contrast to, say, descriptions in thought) afford a primitive way of bringing John before the mind. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: I think the 'file' account of concepts which Fodor has now latched onto gives a wonderful account of names. They are simple if you haven't opened the file yet (like 'Louis', in Evans's example). |
| 12650 | 'Paderewski' has two names in mentalese, for his pianist file and his politician file [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Paderewski (as pianist and as politician) has two names in Mentalese. If you think there are two Paderewskis, it's important that what you get when you retrieve the pianist file differs from the politician file. You can then merge the two files. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: The same will apply to 'Hespherus' and 'Phosphorus'. We can re-separate the 'morning star' and 'evening star' files if we wish to discuss ancient Egyptian attitudes to such things. I love this idea of Fodor's. Explanations flow from it. |
| 12656 | P-and-Q gets its truth from the truth of P and truth of Q, but consistency isn't like that [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The truth of P-and-Q is (roughly) a function of the truth of P and the truth of Q; but the consistency of P&Q isn't a function of the consistency of P and the consistency of Q. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.5 n33) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice deep issue. Fodor is interested in artificial intelligence at this point, but I am interested in the notion of coherence, as found in good justifications. Even consistency isn't elementary logic, never mind coherence. |
| 15682 | Even fairly simple animals make judgements based on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: All organisms form categories: even mealworms have category-based preferences, and higher-order animals such as pigeons or octopi can display quite sophisticated categorical judgements. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: [She cites some 1980 research to support this] This comes as no surprise, as I take categorisation as almost definitive of what a mind is. My surmise is that some sort of 'labelling' system is at the heart of it (like Googlemail labels!). |
| 15691 | Children accept real stable categories, with nonobvious potential that gives causal explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: By five children assume that a variety of categories have rich inductive potential, are stable over outward transformations, include crucial nonobvious properties, have innate potential, privilege causal features, can be explained causally, and are real. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This is Gelman's helpful summary of the findings of research on childhood essentialising, and says the case for this phenomenon is 'compelling'. |
| 15700 | In India, upper-castes essentialize caste more than lower-castes do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The notion of caste in India is more essentialized among upper-caste than lower-caste individuals. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: In a book defending fairly innate essentialism in the human race, Gelman offers this point as a warning that large cultural ingredients can be involved. Racism is the classic difficulty with essentialism. |
| 15685 | Essentialism is either natural to us, or an accident of our culture, or a necessary result of language [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The two views contrasting with essentialism naturally emerging in childhood are the claim that essentialism is a historical accident emerging from Western philosophy, and that essentialism is an inherent consequence of naming things. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Background') | |
| A reaction: Helpful. I take Idea 15682 to rule out the idea that it is just a feature of western culture. I can't conceive of early man surviving without essentialism. I don't think it rules out the naming view. Animals may do what emerges in us as full 'naming'. |
| 15684 | Children's concepts include nonobvious features, like internal parts, functions and causes [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children incorporate a variety of nonobvious features into their concepts, including internal parts, functions, causes, and ontological distinctions. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: This remark sums up the general thesis of her book, which she supports with a wealth of first-hand evidence. It supports my view, that the desire and need for explanation is at the root of essentialist concepts. It's hard wired in us. |
| 15681 | Essentialism: real or representational? sortal, causal or ideal? real particulars, or placeholders? [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We map types of essentialism by asking is it in the world or in our representations, is it sortal or causal or ideal, and is it specific particulars or placeholders for the unknown? | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I am struck by the way that this practising experimental psychologist gets to ask questions and make distinctions much more extensively than most armchair philosophers on the subject. She focuses on the representational, causal, placeholder view. |
| 15678 | Essentialism says categories have a true hidden nature which gives an object its identity [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is the view that categories have an underlying reality or true nature that one cannot observe directly but that gives an object its identity. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: I think the introduction of categories here is a misunderstanding. Does an uncategorisable thing therefore have no identity (even though it has properties)? If categories give objects their identity, what gives categories their identity? |
| 15683 | Sortals are needed for determining essence - the thing must be categorised first [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that sortals are likewise required for determining essence. One cannot answer the question 'What is the essence of this?' without supplying the sortal - of this 'what'. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') | |
| A reaction: I remain baffled by this view. I take the category to be an inductive generalisation from other similar individuals. It can't get off the ground if you don't start with the individuals. Sortals are just a shorthand. |
| 15697 | Kind (unlike individual) essentialism assumes preexisting natural categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: With kind essentialism the person assumes that the world is divided up into preexisting natural categories. Individual essentialism seems not to require any such commitment to kind realism. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: This pinpoints my difficulty: how do we decide whether some category or attributed essence is part of a preexisting natural kind? Some natural kinds are self-evident, like water (roughly), but others need subtle teasing out. How is the teasing done? |
| 15687 | Kinship is essence that comes in degrees, and age groups are essences that change over time [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Kinship is essentialized, but admits of degrees, ...and people can be essentialist even about categories they do not view as fixed over time, such as age groupings. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 03 'Summary') | |
| A reaction: Given my notion of essence are necessarily explanatory, I embrace both of these points. Being very athletic comes in degrees, and changes over times. |
| 15679 | Essentialism comes from the cognitive need to categorise [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism has its source in the cognitive requirement of categorization in certain domains - particularly as they affect the young learner. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Essentialist') | |
| A reaction: I think the phenomenon is better understood as part of the cognitive requirement to understand and explain. Categorisation is just one way to aid explanation. Children try to understand (essentially) a new animal without categorisation. |
| 15698 | We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We found no evidence that mothers teach essentialism to their children. ...Mothers teach children about kinds, not about essences, and mothers help children identify which categories are richly structured. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 07 'Conclusions') | |
| A reaction: This is a psychologist who specialises in this topic. If you think essentialism is inculcated by a our culture, you will have to blame the fathers. |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is a reasoning heuristic that allows us to make fairly good predictions much of the time, but it should not be confused with the structure of reality. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Discussion') | |
| A reaction: She particularly cites biology as the area where it might be inaccurate. I'm beginning to think that the operations of induction are the place to look for an good understanding of essentialism. |
| 15696 | Peope favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People favor historical paths over outward properties when determining what something is. ...An object looking like a knife is less likely to be called 'a knife' if it is described as having been created by accident. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Essentialism') | |
| A reaction: I like this because it talks, suggestively, of 'historical paths' rather than of 'origin'. Thus we might judge a person's identity by their traumatic experience rather than by their birth. This doesn't challenge necessity of origin, but affects labels. |
| 12653 | There's statistical, logical, nomological, conceptual and metaphysical possibility [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Statistically, logically, nomologically, conceptually, and metaphysically possible. That's all the kinds of possibility there are this week, but feel free to add others. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.3) | |
| A reaction: There's also epistemic possibility (possibility 'for all I know'), but I suppose that isn't the real thing. How about 'imaginative possibility' (possibility 'as far as I can imagine')? |
| 15707 | There is intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist and deontological understanding [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The modes of understanding (or modes of construal) which have been proposed are intentional, mechanical, teleological, essentialist, vitalist (perhaps), and deontological. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: She cites psychological research to support this, and calls it 'a relatively small number' of modes. Compare Aristotle's four modes of cause/explanation. |
| 12651 | Some beliefs are only inferred when needed, like 'Shakespeare had not telephone' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Maybe some of your beliefs are inferred 'online' from what you have in your files, along with your inferential rules. 'Shakespeare didn't have a telephone' is a classic example, which we infer if the occasion arises. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: A highly persuasive example. There seem to be a huge swathe of blatantly obvious beliefs (especially negative ones) which may never cross our minds during an entire lifetime, but to which we certainly subscribe. |
| 12628 | Knowing that must come before knowing how [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world. Accordingly, knowing that is prior to knowing how. Descartes was right, and Ryle was wrong. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: The classical example is knowing how to ride a bicycle, when few people can explain what is involved. Clearly you need quite a bit of propositional knowledge before you step on a bike. How does Fodor's claim work for animals? |
| 12625 | Pragmatism is the worst idea ever [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism is perhaps the worst idea that philosophy ever had. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Not an argument, but an interesting sign of the times. Most major modern American philosophers, such as Quine, seem to fit some loose label of 'pragmatist'. I always smell a feeble relativism, and a refusal to face the interesting questions. |
| 15703 | Memories often conform to a theory, rather than being neutral [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Memory is notorious for conforming to theory (rather than memory being a neutral source of information). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This observation by a psychologist is music to sceptics about objectivity. Memory is so fundamental to our basic epistemology that it could even be the nature of thought itself. |
| 15708 | Inductive success is rewarded with more induction [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Inductive success is rewarded with more induction. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Broadening') | |
| A reaction: I love this one. Neat, accurate, and central to how we understand the world. I take inductive success to be stored as labels, concepts, categories, words and general truths, which are then our resource for further attempts. |
| 15694 | Children overestimate the power of a single example [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We suggest that children overestimate the power of a single example. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This conclusion arises from extensive psychological research. 'My grandma smoked, and she lived to be 97' - adults do this too. Wittgenstein says assuming other minds because of your own is induction from one example! |
| 15695 | Children make errors in induction by focusing too much on categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Because of their narrow focus, children's sensitivity to categories as the basis of induction is a reasoning bias that, though useful much of the time, results in systematic errors. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: This is the bad sense of 'essentialism' which worries its opponents. Presumably, though, my favoured scientific essentialism will be 'scientific', and avoid this problem. The relation between categories and induction needs to be clear. |
| 15692 | People tend to be satisfied with shallow explanations [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: People tend to be satisfied with rather shallow explanations. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: She cites some psychological research to support this. Pretty obvious really. I take the so-called 'scientific method' to be nothing more than ceasing to be satisfied with such shallowness. |
| 12636 | Mental states have causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mental states have causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.3) | |
| A reaction: I quote this because it gives you the link between a general account of causal powers as basic to reality, and an active account of what the mind is. It has to be a key link in a decent modern unified account of the world. See Idea 12638. |
| 12661 | The different types of resemblance don't resemble one another [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The ways in which different kinds of thing are similar to one another aren't, in general, similar to one another. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but I think one would say that they lack similarity at the level of primary thought, but have obvious similarity (as concept-connectors) at the level of meta-thought. |
| 12632 | In the Representational view, concepts play the key linking role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the Representational Theory of Mind is true, then concepts are constituents of beliefs, the units of semantic evaluation, a locus of causal interactions among mental representations, and formulas in Mentalese. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1) | |
| A reaction: I like this aspect of the theory, but then I can't really think of a theory about how the mind works that doesn't make concepts central to it. |
| 12624 | Only the labels of nodes have semantic content in connectionism, and they play no role [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Connectionism has no truck with mental representations; on the one hand, only the node labels in 'neural networks' have semantic content, and, on the other, the node labels play no role in mental processes, in standard formulations. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: Connectionism must have some truth in it, yet mere connections can't do the full job. The difficulty is that nothing else seems to do the 'full job' either. Fodor cites productivity, systematicity, compositionality, logical form as the problems. |
| 12640 | Associative thinking avoids syntax, but can't preserve sense, reference or truth [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The virtue of associative theories of thinking is that they don't require thoughts to have syntactic structure. But they can't be right, since association doesn't preserve either sense or reference (to say nothing of truth). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n28) | |
| A reaction: This is using the empiricist idea that knowledge is built from mechanical associations to give a complete account of what thinking is. Fodor resolutely opposes it. |
| 12641 | Connectionism gives no account of how constituents make complex concepts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Connectionist architectures provide no counterpart to the relation between a complex concept and its constituents. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3 n29) | |
| A reaction: This is the compositionality of thought, upon which Fodor is so insistent. Not that a theory of how the mind is built up from the body is quite likely to give you a theory about what thinking is. I try to keep them separate, which may be wrong. |
| 15680 | Folk essentialism rests on belief in natural kinds, in hidden properties, and on words indicating structures [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: The three components of essentialism as a folk belief are the idea that certain categories are natural kinds, the idea that some unobservable property causes the way things are, and the idea that words reflect real structures. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 01 'Prelims') |
| 12643 | Ambiguities in English are the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: That there are ambiguities in English is the classic reason for claiming that we don't think in English. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: I have always been impressed by this simple observation, which is my main reason for believing in propositions (as brain events). 'Propositions' may just be useful chunks of mentalese. |
| 12647 | Mental representations name things in the world, but also files in our memory [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Mental representations can serve both as names for things in the world and as names of files in the memory. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: I am laughed at for liking this idea (given the present files of ideas before you), but I think this it is very powerful. Chicken before egg. I was drawn to databases precisely because they seemed to map how the mind worked. |
| 12649 | We think in file names [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We think in file names. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: This is Fodor's new view. He cites Treisman and Schmidt (1982) for raising it, and Pylyshyn (2003) for discussing it. I love it. It exactly fits my introspective view of how I think, and I think it would fit animals. It might not fit some other people! |
| 12655 | Frame Problem: how to eliminate most beliefs as irrelevant, without searching them? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The frame problem is, precisely: How does one know that none of one's beliefs about Jupiter are germane to the current question, without having to recall and search one's beliefs about Jupiter? | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.4) | |
| A reaction: Presumably good chess-playing computers have made some progress with this problem. The only answer, as far as I can see, is that brains have a lot in common with relational databases. The mind is structured around a relevance-pattern. |
| 12630 | If concept content is reference, then my Twin and I are referring to the same stuff [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: If the content of a concept is its reference, we can stop worrying about Twin Earth. If there are no senses, there is no question of whether my twin and I have the same WATER concept. Our WATER concepts aren't even coextensive. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a neat solution. So do 'tap water' and 'holy water' have the same content to a Christian and non-Christian, when they co-refer to the contents of the font? |
| 12658 | Nobody knows how concepts are acquired [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I don't know how concepts are acquired. Nor do you. Nor does anybody else. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: This comes in the context of quietly modifying his earlier claim that concepts weren't acquired, because they were largely innate. Presumably we are allowed to have theories of concept acquisition? I quite like abstractionism. |
| 12662 | We have an innate capacity to form a concept, once we have grasped the stereotype [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: What's learned are stereotypes. What's innate is the disposition to grasp such and such a concept (to lock to such a property) in consequence of having learned such and such a stereotype. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the late Fodor much ameliorated view, after a lot of scoffing about the idea of the tin-opener being innate in all of us. There may be a suspicion of circularity here, if we ask what mental abilities are needed to form a stereotype. |
| 12635 | Having a concept isn't a pragmatic matter, but being able to think about the concept [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism about concepts really is dead, and the only alternative about concept possession is Cartesianism. That is, it's the thesis that having concept C is being able to think about Cs (as such). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.2) | |
| A reaction: I like this. It is very hard to pick out from Fodor the bits where he is clearly right, but this seems to be one of them. I don't like the pragmatic or Wittgensteinian line that having concepts is all about abilities and uses (like sorting or inferring). |
| 12652 | Concepts have two sides; they are files that face thought, and also face subject-matter [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We think in file names, and file names are Janus-faced: one face turned towards thinking and the other face turned towards what is thought about. I do think that is rather satisfactory. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3 App) | |
| A reaction: So do I. I do hope the philosophical community take up this idea (which they probably won't, simply because Fodor is in the late stages of his career!). |
| 15686 | Labels may indicate categories which embody an essence [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Labels may signal categories that are believed to embody an essence. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 02 'Privileged') | |
| A reaction: This is quoted by her, as a summary of a substantial body of research which she endorses. I cite it because it pinpoints my own view. I take 'labels' to be basic to minds, as organisers of thought, and this ties essences to labels. Satisfying picture. |
| 12626 | Cartesians put concept individuation before concept possession [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Cartesians think that concept individuation is prior, in order of analysis, to concept possession. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.12) | |
| A reaction: Peacocke is someone who seems to put possession first, to the point where individuation is thereby achieved. The background influence there is Wittgenstein. I think I am more with Fodor, that concepts are entities, which need to be understood. |
| 12637 | Frege's puzzles suggest to many that concepts have sense as well as reference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers in droves have held that Frege cases are convincing arguments that concepts have not just referents but also senses. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Frege cases are puzzles where simple reference seems to lead to confusion] I take the Fregean approach to concepts (of Dummett, Peacocke) to attempt to give an account of the sense, once the reference is decided. Idea 12629 gives Fodor's view. |
| 12638 | If concepts have sense, we can't see the connection to their causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: How are we to understand the connection between the identity of a concept and its causal powers if concepts are (or have) senses? Answer: I haven't a clue. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the key to Fodor's attack on Peacocke and other Fregeans - that while they pay lip-service to the project of naturalising thought, they are actually committing us to some sort of neo-platonism, by losing the causal links. See Idea 12636. |
| 12639 | Belief in 'senses' may explain intentionality, but not mental processes [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Supposing the mind to be conversant with senses can, maybe, provide for a theory of the intentionality of mental states; but it seems to shed no light at all on the nature of mental processes (i.e. of mental state transitions). | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: I would track this back to Frege's hostility to 'psychologism'. That is, Fregeans don't care about Fodor's problem, because all their accounts (of mathematics, of logic, and of concepts) treat the subject-matter as self-contained sui generis. |
| 15690 | Causal properties are seen as more central to category concepts [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Properties that enter into causally meaningful links are better remembered and are treated as more central to the category than properties that are not causally meaningful. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation2') | |
| A reaction: This is a summary of considerable psychological research. This account not only sounds plausible, but would fit better withy why we form concepts and categories in the first place. We are trying to relate to the causations of nature. |
| 12654 | You can't think 'brown dog' without thinking 'brown' and 'dog' [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can think 'brown dog' without thinking 'cat', but you can't think 'brown dog' without thinking 'brown' and 'dog'. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.4.3) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is talking about concepts in thought, not about words. The claim is that such concepts have to be compositional, and it is hard to disagree. |
| 12659 | Maybe stereotypes are a stage in concept acquisition (rather than a by-product) [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: We needn't say that learning a stereotype is just a by-product of acquiring the concept; it could rather be a stage in concept acquisition. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: He rejects stereotypes because they don't give concepts the necessary compositionality in thought. But this idea would mean that children were incapable of compositionality until they had transcended the primitive stereotype stage. |
| 12660 | One stereotype might be a paradigm for two difference concepts [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The same stereotype can give difference concepts; chickens are paradigmatic instances both of FOOD and of BARNYARD FOWL. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.4) | |
| A reaction: And I'm guessing that lots of concepts could have two equally plausible stereotypes, even within a single mind. Stereotypes are interesting, but they don't seem to be the key to our understanding of concepts. |
| 15688 | Categories are characterized by distance from a prototype [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: On prototype views, categories are characterized by distance from a prototype. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation') | |
| A reaction: Gelman observes that this view makes no reference to any causal features of things. This cuts them off from using underlying essences in the process of categorisation and concept-formation. How do you spot a prototype, with no category? |
| 15689 | Theory-based concepts use rich models to show which similarities really matter [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Theory-based approaches to categories are a response to the limitations of mere similarities holding the category together, and require knowledge-rich explanatory models to say which features are more central to a concept. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 05 'Causation1') | |
| A reaction: I see a promising account in linking theory theory to essentialism. For a physical object (or even for a process) infer a structure, and then identify what is most important in that structure. That gives you your stable, agreed concept. |
| 12629 | For the referential view of thought, the content of a concept is just its reference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Pure referentialism is the kind of semantics RTM requires (reference is the only primitive mind-world semantic property). ...So the content of a concept is its reference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to say that the meaning of a concept is (typically) a physical object, which seems to be the 'Fido'-Fido view of meaning. It seems to me to be a category mistake to say that a meaning can be a cat. |
| 12631 | Compositionality requires that concepts be atomic [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Atomism must be right about the individuation of concepts because compositionality demands it. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch1) | |
| A reaction: I suppose this seems right, though Fodor's own example of 'pet fish' is interesting. What is supposed to happen when you take a concept like 'pet' and put it with 'fish', given that both components shift their atomic (?) meaning in the process? |
| 15699 | Prelinguistic infants acquire and use many categories [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Language does not appear to be necessary for forming categories, since prelinguistic infants acquire many categories, and even use categories to form inferences about unknown properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: She cites lots of research in support of this claim. The idea may come as a surprise to some people, but not to me. I take it that categorisation is what a brain is for, including animal brains. |
| 12657 | Abstractionism claims that instances provide criteria for what is shared [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: In the idea of learning concepts by 'abstraction', experiences of the instances provide evidence about which of the shared properties of things in a concept's extension are 'criterial' for being in the concept's extension. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.5.2 n6) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is fairly sceptical of this approach, and his doubts are seen in the scare-quotes around 'criterial'. He is defending the idea that only a certain degree of innateness in the concepts can get such a procedure off the ground. |
| 12634 | 'Inferential-role semantics' says meaning is determined by role in inference [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: 'Inferential-role semantics' claims that the meaning of a word (/the content of a concept) is determined by its role in inference. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.2.1.2 n14) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is deeply opposed to this view. At first blush it sounds wrong to me, since there seems to be plenty of thought that can go on before inference takes place. Daydreamy speculation, for example. |
| 12642 | Co-referring terms differ if they have different causal powers [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: The representation of 'morning star' must be different from 'evening star' because their tokens differ in their causal powers. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.3) | |
| A reaction: This is Fodor trying to avoid the standard Fregean move of proposing that there are 'senses' as well as references. See Idea 12629. If these two terms have the same extension, they are the same concept? They 'seem' to have two referents. |
| 12663 | We refer to individuals and to properties, and we use singular terms and predicates [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: I assume that there are two kinds of reference: reference to individuals and to properties. This means, from the syntactic point of view, that the vehicles of reference are exhaustively singular terms and predicates. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.7) | |
| A reaction: The immediate possibility that comes to mind is plural quantification. See George Boolos, who confidently says that he can refer to 'some Cheerios' in his breakfast bowl, and communicate very well. He then looks to formalise such talk. |
| 12645 | Semantics (esp. referential semantics) allows inferences from utterances to the world [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: All you need for inferring from John's utterance to the world is the sort of thing that a semantics (i.e. referential semantics) provides. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: Fodor is very good at saying nice simple things like that. But it is not enough to infer what objects are being discussed. All the hard cases must be covered (denials of existence, reference to non-existence, intentional contexts, modal claims). |
| 12646 | Semantics relates to the world, so it is never just psychological [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Semantics is about constitutive relations between representations and the world. There is, as a matter of principle, no such thing as a psychological theory of meaning. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.3.5) | |
| A reaction: The second sentence is in capital letters, but I am still not convinced. The classic difficulty seems to be that you have to use language to pick out the things in the world that are being referred to. Of course, at some point you just see the objects. |
| 12627 | Before you can plan action, you must decide on the truth of your estimate of success [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: You can't think a plan of action unless you can think how the world would be if the action were to succeed; and thinking the world will be such and such if all goes well is thinking the kind of thing that can be true or false. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (LOT 2 [2008], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: This is part of Fodor's attack on the pragmatic view of concepts (that they should be fully understood in terms of action, rather than of thought). I take Fodor to be blatantly correct. This is counterfactual thinking. |
| 15693 | One sample of gold is enough, but one tree doesn't give the height of trees [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: We can confidently determine the chemical composition of gold from just a single sample, but we cannot determine the height of trees from just a single tree. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 06 'The role') | |
| A reaction: The tricky word here is 'confidently'. If you meet one Latvian who is nice, do you assume they are all nice? At what point do you decide gold etc. really are natural kinds, where one sample tells all? Evolution of species... |
| 15701 | Nouns seem to invoke stable kinds more than predicates do [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Children judged personal characteristics as more stable when they were referred to by a noun ('She is a carrot eater') than by a verbal predicate ('She eats carrots whenever she can') | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 08 'Naming') | |
| A reaction: This fits with my feeling that 'labels' are the basis of how the mind works. The noun invokes a genuine category of thing, where a predicate attaches to some preselected category ('she'). Gelman says names encourage inductions. |
| 16746 | Principles of things are not hidden features of forms, but the laws by which they were formed [Newton] |
| Full Idea: The (active) principles I consider not as occult qualities, supposed to result from the specific forms of things, but as general laws of nature, by which the things themselves are formed. | |
| From: Isaac Newton (Queries to the 'Opticks' [1721], q 31), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 23.6 | |
| A reaction: This is the external, 'imposed' view of laws (with the matter passive) at its most persuasive. If laws arise out the stuff (as I prefer to think), what principles went into the formulation of the stuff? |
| 15705 | Essentialism encourages us to think about the world scientifically [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism encourages a 'scientific' mindset in thinking about the natural world, a belief that intensive study of a natural domain will yield ever more underlying properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Maybe scientists must be committed to essences, the way mathematicians must be committed to numbers? This idea spendidly opposes the doubts expressed by Popper. |
| 15702 | Essentialism doesn't mean we know the essences [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism does not entail that people know what the essence is. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 09 'Theory') | |
| A reaction: This is a fundamental and (I would say) fairly obvious point, but it needs to be made to the more passionate opponents of essentialism. |
| 15704 | Essentialism starts from richly structured categories, leading to a search for underlying properties [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: If my speculations are correct, then essentialism starts out strictly as a belief that many categories are richly structured kinds, then additionally becomes a search for underlying inherent properties. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 10 'Figuring') | |
| A reaction: This is her summary of extensive essentialist research among children. She favours the priority of kinds and categories. We actually change taxonomies on the basis of revisions in our accounts of essence. Science negotiates. |
| 15706 | A major objection to real essences is the essentialising of social categories like race, caste and occupation [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: One major argument against the view that essences are real is the rampant essentializing of categories that are socially constructed (such as race, caste and occupation). | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Is essentialism') | |
| A reaction: You can't argue with that. It raises the question of whether the approach of scientific essentialism has any value in the social, rather than physical, sciences. We jokingly essentialise groups of people such as referees or Oxonians. |