In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays On Cognitive Science And The Philosophy Of Mind

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E-Book Overview

In this book Jerry Fodor contrasts his views about the mind with those of a number of well-known philosophers and cognitive scientists, including John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Paul Smolensky, and Richard Dawkins. Several of these essays are published here for the first time. The rest originated as book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, or in journals of philosophy or psychology. The topics examined include cognitive architecture, the nature of concepts, and the status of Darwinism in psychology. Fodor constructs a version of the Representational Theory of Mind that blends Intentional Realism, Computational Reductionism, Nativism, and Semantic Atomism.

E-Book Content

Preface Philosophy, like piloting , is mostly about 6guring out where you are. The basicprinciple of both is much the same: Find an object whose position is known and locate yourself with respectto it . Typically , in both cases , the object in question is somewherethat you do not wish to be: On a rock, on a shoal, at the edge of the channel, or half a mile inland from the shore. So the trick is to get closeenough to recognizethe thing and to 6gure out what it means, but not so close that it swallows you up. Thus Aristotle with respectto Plato, Kant with respectto Hume, Descarteswith respect to Newton, and me with respectto many a bell buoy on many a summer Sundayafternoon. The difference is that whereasnavigators don' t often argue with their landmarks, philosophers hardly ever do anything else. Hence this collection . Eachof these essaysreactsto a position in philosophy or cognitive science(in the present context the distinction is hardly worth drawing) that I 'm pretty sure I don't want to occupy, but that I'm also pretty sure needs to be marked on the charts and, as sailors say, "honored." I think that not getting wrecked re