Table Of Content

Preface and Acknowledgments (cid:0) Except for the eponymous essay, all the pieces collected here have ' been published previously. Though I ve corrected some minor errors, typos and the like, I've otherwise left them intact. In some cases, the later essays reject ideas toward which the earlier ones were partial. (An egregious example is the treatment of teleological approach es to the naturalization of selnantical relations; these are viewed with optimism " " " " in Fodor's Guide and Selnantics, Wisconsin Style but " " ' denounced in A Theory of Content I. ) I think there s nevertheless a substantial consistency from chapter to chapter; a fairly fixed sense of what needs to be done comports with an evolving account of how ' ' to do it. Since, anyhow, I don t write for posterity, I don t feel bad about changing my mind in public. Posterity will, no doubt, have problems of its own; I am glad to settle for a slightly better story to tell than the one I had last week. " " Fodor's Guide to Mental Representation is .reprinted from Mind, Spring 1985, pp. 55-97, by the kind permission of the Oxford University " " Press. Selnantics, Wisconsin Style is reprinted from Synthese 59, 1984, pp. 231-250, copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers, by the " " kind permission of the publisher. Making Mind Matter More is reprinted from PhilosophicalT opics LXVD. 1, pp. 59-79, by the kind " permission of PhilosophicalT opics. Substitution Arguments and the " Individuation of Belief is reprinted from G. Boolos, ed., 1989, Method, Reasona nd Language, Cambridge: the Cambridge University " Press, by the kind permission of the publisher. Review of Stephen " Schiffer's Remnantso f Meaning is reprinted from Philosophya nd Phe- nomenologicaRl esearch5 0, 2, by the kind permission of Philosophya nd " " P~ omenologicaRl esearc.h PrO Os of Modularity of Mind is reprinted from The Behaviorala nd Brain Sciences8 , 1985, 1-42 by the kind permission " of the publisher, Cambridge University Press. Why Should " the Mind Be Modular ? is reprinted from A. George, ed., Reflections on Chomsky, 1989, by the kind permission of Basil Blackwell, Ltd. " " Observation Reconsidered is reprinted from Philosophyo f Science viii Preface and Acknowledgments " ' 5,1 19,p 8.p42 -34,3a nAdR etpoCl\ yu rchsl'aP nedrceptual " tidatynT dh eoNreetuic'tatiaslr l eitpyrifnrotPemdh ilo-Ps]aso- phy en5c,51 e9 ,p 8.p81 8-189.B 8oathrree prbinytth ekedi np de orf Smci- ission oPf h'iP lohosSyfc ci.ence I sholuikltdeot haMn.k rM arSticnh isfsoehrl imhs eailnnp assemthmbel ain'nigpu. tsa Introduction (cid:0) With the exception of two enjoyable, but essentially digressive, interludes of Connectionist bashing (see Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988; Fodor and Mclaughlin , 1989) the essays included here represent my major professional preoccupations for the last five or six years. As the reader will see at a glance, they divide in two. On the one hand, ' there s a batch of more or less philosophical pieces on mental representation and the foundations of intentionality ; and, on the other ' hand, there s a batch of more or less psychological pieces on cognitive architecture. You may wonder whether these topics have anything in common other than my recent interest in both. I thought that a brief introductory note on that might be appropriate. Here is one way that the two topics might be taken to connect: a goal that theories of cognitive architecture pursue is to say whatever there is that's general about the character of the causal interactions that can occur among cognitive states. You might think of such theories as hying to provide a taxonomy of the nomologically possible " " mental proces ses, where a nomologically possible mental process is one that's compatible with psychological law. Now, among the views of intentional content that have, from time to time, found " favor in the philosophical community, there is this familiar functionalist " one: the intentional contents of mental states are constituted - or, anyhow, constrained- by their causal interrelations. So, according to such views, part (or maybe all) of what it is for your current mental state to be a thought that somec ats havew hiskersi s its being a state that has a disposition to cause you to think the thought that some animals do. It is thus intrinsic to cat thoughts that they tend to cause animal thoughts; so this sort of story goes. Suppose, for the moment, that this is true. Then a theory that says what kinds of causal relations among mental states are possible would, ipso facto, be a theory of the (or of one of the) determinants of content. Functionalism proposes a bridge from cognitive architecture to semantics , to put the point in a nutshell. Given functionalism, what x Introduction mental proces ses there can be partly determines what thoughts you can have. ' I say you might suppose this, but I don t. Finding alternatives to functionalist accounts of mental content is a major concern in these ' studies. Here s why: I take it very seriously that there is no principled distinction between matters of meaning and matters of fact. Quine was right; you ' cant have an analytic/synthetic distinction . In the present context, ' this means that you cant have a principled distinction between the kinds of causal relations among mental states that determine content ' and the kind of causal relations among mental states that don t. The ' immediate consequence is that you cant have functionalism without holism; if any of the function of a mental state bears on its content, then all of its function bears on its content. But if all of function bears on content, then no two mental state tokens ever have the same content and there can be no such thing as psychological explanation by subsumption under intentional law. So the story is that if you take it seriously that there is no analytic/ ' synthetic distinction , then there s a prima facie inference from functionalism to holism and from holism to skepticism; and the question is what to do about it. As far as I can tell, there are two main camps: either you accept the inference and live with the skepticism, or you try to block the inference by taking it less than absolutely seriously that there is no analytic/synthetic distinction . The first kind of philosopher says: "Well, very strictly speaking- in a first-class conceptual system, and like that- it really isn't true that people act out of their ' beliefs and desires. Very strictly speakingt here cant be a scientific intentional psychology, however much belief-desire explanation may " be a human necessity and however well it may work in practice. The " ' other kind of philosopher says:: 1 know, of course, that you cant have a full-blown analytic synthetic distinction; but perhaps you can have a graded, or relativized, or localized, or otherwise denatured ' analytidsynthetic distinction . In which case, functionalism doesnt " imply holism and is compatible with intentional realism after all. But it seems to me that none of this will do. If it follows from your semantics that very strictly speakingn obody has ever thought that perhaps it was going to rain, then there is something wrong with your semantics. (Cf. G. E. Mooreonepistemologies from which it ' follows that very strictly speakingy ou don t know whether you have hands.) And the arguments that there is no analytic/synthetic distinction are arguments that there is no analytic/synthetic distinction; ' not even a little one. Quine s point (utterly convincing, in my view) is that what pass for intuitions of analyticity are in fact intuitions of Introduction xi centrality; and centrality is an epistemicr elation, not a semantical one. That is to say: a functional analysis which would account for intuitions ' ' of analyticity, wouldn t determine content. It wouldn t be a ' semantict heory (even if we had one- which we don t). The semantical parts of this book are largely about how to square ' intentional realism with Quine s being right about analytidsynthetic . The way to do it is to be relentlessly atomistic about meaning (which means, of course not being a functionalist about meaning; see above). What's nice about informational theories of meaning is precisely that they point the way to relentless semantic atomism. In the general case, the information that a symbol carries is independent of it causal relations to other symbols; a symbol can satisfy the constraints for ' carrying information eveni f it doesnt belongt o a language. Informational theories of meaning have their problems, to be sure, many of which raise their heads in the chapters that follow. But holism is not among the problems that they have. Informational semanticists can therefore be robustly realist about content; something that no other kind of semanticist has thus far figured out how to be. ' So much, then, for what the two parts of this book dont have in ' common; they arent linked by a semantics that makes cognitive architecture a determinant of intentional content. In fact, the unity is thematic. Just as an informational view of semantics, of the sort developed in part I, offers the possibility of atomism about meaning, so a modular view of cognitive architecture, of the sort developed in part ll, offers the possibility of atomism about perception. Semantic atomism is the idea that what you mean is largely independent of what you believe; perceptual atomism is the idea that so too is what you see. These ideas come together in epistemology in a way that the last essays in this volume only begin to explore. It is, perhaps, the characteristic strategy of (serious) philosophers in our time to appeal to semantic and psychological holism to support epistemic relativism. (Our frivolous philosophers arrive at much the same conclusion, though by worse arguments, or by none). Thus, if what you mean depends on what you believe, it must be ' a fallacy of equivocation to suppose that Jones theory could assert ' what Smith s theory denies. So the theory Jones believes must be compatible with the theory Smith believes. Between compatible theories there is, however, nothing to choose. Thus semantic holism leads to incommensurability and incommensurability leads to relativism . Or again, if what you see is determined by what you believe, then scientists with different theories see different things even when they are in the samee xperimentale nvironmen.t So experimental obser-