72 ideas
| 2474 | It seems likely that analysis of concepts is impossible, but justification can survive without it [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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) [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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) |
| 1618 | We study bound variables not to know reality, but to know what reality language asserts [Quine] |
| Full Idea: We look to bound variables in connection with ontology not in order to know what there is, but in order to know what a given remark or doctrine, ours or someone else's, says there is. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.15) |
| 8455 | Canonical notation needs quantification, variables and predicates, but not names [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: Quine says that names need not be part of one's canonical notation; in fact, whatever scientific purposes are accomplished by names can be carried out just as well by the devices of quantification, variables and predicates. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This is part of Quine's analysis of where the ontological commitment of a language is to be found. Kripke's notion that a name baptises an item comes as a challenge to this view. |
| 8456 | Quine extended Russell's defining away of definite descriptions, to also define away names [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: Quine extended Russell's theory for defining away definite descriptions, so that he could also define away names. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Quine also gets rid of universals and properties, so his ontology is squeezed from both the semantic and the metaphysical directions. Quine seems to be the key figure in modern ontology. If you want to expand it (E.J. Lowe), justify yourself to Quine. |
| 1611 | Names can be converted to descriptions, and Russell showed how to eliminate those [Quine] |
| Full Idea: I have shown that names can be converted to descriptions, and Russell has shown that descriptions can be eliminated. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.12) |
| 1613 | Logicists cheerfully accept reference to bound variables and all sorts of abstract entities [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The logicism of Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church and Carnap condones the use of bound variables or reference to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 1616 | Formalism says maths is built of meaningless notations; these build into rules which have meaning [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The formalism of Hilbert keeps classical maths as a play of insignificant notations. Agreement is found among the rules which, unlike the notations, are quite significant and intelligible. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.15) |
| 1615 | Intuitionism says classes are invented, and abstract entities are constructed from specified ingredients [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The intuitionism of Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl and others holds that classes are invented, and accepts reference to abstract entities only if they are constructed from pre-specified ingredients. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 1614 | Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 10241 | For Quine, there is only one way to exist [Quine, by Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Quine takes 'existence' to be univocal, with a single ontology for his entire 'web of belief'. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Stewart Shapiro - Philosophy of Mathematics 4.9 | |
| A reaction: Thus, there can be no 'different way of existing' (such as 'subsisting') for abstract objects such as those of mathematics. I presume that Quine's low-key physicalism is behind this. |
| 4064 | The idea of a thing and the idea of existence are two sides of the same coin [Quine, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: According to Quine's conception of existence, the idea of a thing and the idea of existence are two sides of the same coin. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Tim Crane - Elements of Mind 1.5 | |
| A reaction: I suspect that Quine's ontology is too dependent on language, but this thought seems profoundly right |
| 19277 | Quine rests existence on bound variables, because he thinks singular terms can be analysed away [Quine, by Hale] |
| Full Idea: It is because Quine holds constant singular terms to be always eliminable by an extension of Russell's theory of definite descriptions that he takes the bound variables of first-order quantification to be the sole means by which we refer to objects. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Bob Hale - Necessary Beings 01.2 | |
| A reaction: Hale defends a Fregean commitment to existence based on the reference of singular terms in true statements. I think they're both wrong. If you want to know what I am committed to, ask me. Don't infer it from my use of English, or logic. |
| 12210 | Quine's ontology is wrong; his question is scientific, and his answer is partly philosophical [Fine,K on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Quine's approach to ontology asks the wrong question, a scientific rather than philosophical question, and answers it in the wrong way, by appealing to philosophical considerations in addition to ordinary scientific considerations. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Kit Fine - The Question of Ontology p.161 | |
| A reaction: He goes on to call Quine's procedure 'cockeyed'. Presumably Quine would reply with bafflement that scientific and philosophical questions could be considered as quite different from one another. |
| 8496 | What actually exists does not, of course, depend on language [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Ontological controversy tends into controversy over language, but we must not jump to the conclusion that what there is depends on words. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.16) | |
| A reaction: An important corrective to my constant whinge against philosophers who treat ontology as if it were semantics, of whom Quine is the central villain. Quine was actually quite a sensible chap. |
| 1610 | To be is to be the value of a variable, which amounts to being in the range of reference of a pronoun [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To be assumed as an entity is to be reckoned as the value of a variable. This amounts roughly to saying that to be is to be in the range of reference of a pronoun. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.13) | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 7784. |
| 8459 | Fictional quantification has no ontology, so we study ontology through scientific theories [Quine, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: In fiction, 'Once upon a time there was an F who...' obviously does not make an ontological commitment, so Quine says the question of which ontology we accept must be dealt with in terms of the role an ontology plays in a scientific worldview. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to invite questions about the ontology of people who don't espouse a scientific worldview. If your understanding of the outside world and of the past is created for you by storytellers, you won't be a Quinean. |
| 8497 | An ontology is like a scientific theory; we accept the simplest scheme that fits disorderly experiences [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Our acceptance of ontology is similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory; we adopt the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.16) | |
| A reaction: Quine (who says he likes 'desert landscapes') is the modern hero for anyone who loves Ockham's Razor, and seeks extreme simplicity. And yet he finds himself committed to the existence of sets to achieve this. |
| 16261 | If commitment rests on first-order logic, we obviously lose the ontology concerning predication [Maudlin on Quine] |
| Full Idea: If Quine restricts himself to first-order predicate calculus, then the ontological implications concern the subjects of predicates. The nature of predicates, and what must be true for the predication, have disappeared from the radar screen. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Tim Maudlin - The Metaphysics within Physics 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Quine's response, I presume, is that the predicates can all be covered extensionally (red is a list of the red objects), and so a simpler logic will do the whole job. I agree with Maudlin though. |
| 7698 | If to be is to be the value of a variable, we must already know the values available [Jacquette on Quine] |
| Full Idea: To apply Quine's criterion that to be is to be the value of a quantifier-bound variable, we must already know the values of bound variables, which is to say that we must already be in possession of a preferred existence domain. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], Ch.6) by Dale Jacquette - Ontology | |
| A reaction: [A comment on Idea 1610]. Very nice to accuse Quine, of all people, of circularity, given his attack on analytic-synthetic with the same strategy! The values will need to be known extra-lingistically, to avoid more circularity. |
| 2469 | The world is full of messy small things producing stable large-scale properties (e.g. mountains) [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 1612 | Realism, conceptualism and nominalism in medieval universals reappear in maths as logicism, intuitionism and formalism [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The three medieval views on universals (realism, conceptualism and nominalism) reappear in the philosophy of maths as logicism, intuitionism and formalism. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.14) |
| 2475 | Don't define something by a good instance of it; a good example is a special case of the ordinary example [Fodor] |
| 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) |
| 15402 | There is no entity called 'redness', and that some things are red is ultimate and irreducible [Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is not any entity whatever, individual or otherwise, which is named by the word 'redness'. ...That the houses and roses and sunsets are all of them red may be taken as ultimate and irreducible. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to invite the 'ostrich' charge (Armstrong), that there is something left over that needs explaining. If the reds are ultimate and irreducible, that seems to imply that they have no relationship at all to one another. |
| 4443 | Quine has argued that predicates do not have any ontological commitment [Quine, by Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Quine has attempted to bypass the problem of universals by arguing for the ontological innocence of predicates, since it is the application conditions of predicates which furnish the Realists with much of their case. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by David M. Armstrong - Universals p.503 | |
| A reaction: Presumably this would be a claim that predicates appear to commit us to properties, but that properties are not natural features, and can be reduced to something else. Tricky.. |
| 8498 | Treating scattered sensations as single objects simplifies our understanding of experience [Quine] |
| Full Idea: By bringing together scattered sense events and treating them as perceptions of one object, we reduce the complexity of our stream of experience to a manageable conceptual simplicity. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.17) | |
| A reaction: If, however, our consideration of tricky cases, such as vague objects, or fast-changing objects, or spatially coinciding objects made it all seem too complex, then Quine's argument would be grounds for abandoning objects. See Merricks. |
| 8856 | Quine's indispensability argument said arguments for abstracta were a posteriori [Quine, by Yablo] |
| Full Idea: Fifty years ago, Quine convinced everyone who cared that the argument for abstract objects, if there were going to be one, would have to be a posteriori in nature; an argument that numbers, for example, are indispensable entities for 'total science'. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], §1) by Stephen Yablo - Apriority and Existence | |
| A reaction: This sets the scene for the modern debate on the a priori. The claim that abstractions are indispensable for a factual account of the physical world strikes me as highly implausible. |
| 12443 | Can an unactualized possible have self-identity, and be distinct from other possibles? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselve and distinct from one another. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.4) | |
| A reaction: Can he seriously mean that we are not allowed to talk about possible objects? If I design a house, it is presumably identical to the house I am designing, and distinct from houses I'm not designing. |
| 2502 | How do you count beliefs? [Fodor] |
| Full Idea: There is no agreed way of counting beliefs. | |
| From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.16) |
| 18209 | We can never translate our whole language of objects into phenomenalism [Quine] |
| Full Idea: There is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.18), quoted by Penelope Maddy - Naturalism in Mathematics III.2 |
| 2501 | Berkeley seems to have mistakenly thought that chairs are the same as after-images [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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) |
| 2503 | Empirical approaches see mind connections as mirrors/maps of reality [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2508 | The function of a mind is obvious [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2485 | Do intentional states explain our behaviour? [Fodor] |
| 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! [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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' [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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) |
| 2499 | Modules analyse stimuli, they don't tell you what to do [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2496 | Blindness doesn't destroy spatial concepts [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2497 | Something must take an overview of the modules [Fodor] |
| 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'. |
| 2509 | Modules have in-built specialist information [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2491 | Modules have encapsulation, inaccessibility, private concepts, innateness [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2495 | Obvious modules are language and commonsense explanation [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2498 | Modules make the world manageable [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2500 | Babies talk in consistent patterns [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2480 | Language is ambiguous, but thought isn't [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2487 | Mentalese may also incorporate some natural language [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2483 | Mentalese doesn't require a theory of meaning [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 2486 | Content can't be causal role, because causal role is decided by content [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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? [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 1619 | There is an attempt to give a verificationist account of meaning, without the error of reducing everything to sensations [Dennett on Quine] |
| Full Idea: This essay offered a verificationist account of language without the logical positivist error of supposing that verification could be reduced to a mere sequence of sense-experiences. | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Daniel C. Dennett - works | |
| A reaction: This is because of Quine's holistic view of theory, so that sentences are not tested individually, where sense-data might be needed as support, but as whole teams which need to be simple, coherent etc. |
| 2477 | If to understand "fish" you must know facts about them, where does that end? [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 1609 | I do not believe there is some abstract entity called a 'meaning' which we can 'have' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers construe meaningfulness as the having (in some sense of 'having') of some abstract entity which he calls a meaning, whereas I do not. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: To call a meaning an 'entity' is to put a spin on it that makes it very implausible. Introspection shows us a gap between grasping a word and grasping its meaning. |
| 1617 | The word 'meaning' is only useful when talking about significance or about synonymy [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The useful ways in which ordinary people talk about meanings boil down to two: the having of meanings, which is significance, and sameness of meaning, or synonymy. | |
| From: Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948], p.11) | |
| A reaction: If the Fregean criterion for precise existence is participation in an identity relation, then synonymy does indeed pinpoint what we mean by 'meaning. |
| 19159 | Quine relates predicates to their objects, by being 'true of' them [Quine, by Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Quine relates predicates to the things of which they can be predicated ...and hence predicates are 'true of' each and every thing of which the predicate can be truly predicated. | |
| From: report of Willard Quine (On What There Is [1948]) by Donald Davidson - Truth and Predication 5 | |
| A reaction: Davidson comments that the virtue of Quine's view is negative, in avoiding a regress in the explanation of predication. I'm not sure about true 'of' as an extra sort of truth, but I like dropping predicates from ontology, and sticking to truths. |
| 2473 | Analysis is impossible without the analytic/synthetic distinction [Fodor] |
| 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 [Fodor] |
| 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. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |