Term Paper on "Fodor Since the Beginning of His Career"

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Fodor

Since the beginning of his career in the early 1960's Jerry Fodor has been able to produce a number of discrete arguments regarding cognitive science and philosophy of the mind; and just as these two fields of thought are distinct yet similar, so too are Fodor's major theses. In 1983 Fodor published his book Modularity of the Mind and argued that many low-level, peripheral systems of the mind are modular. In 1987 his Psychosemantics was published, and within it he made a strong case for the causal theory of reference. Though superficially unrelated, after analyzing Fodor's works it becomes evident that his particular form of causal reference grows out of his case for modularity. "What binds together the various elements of Fodor's output is that they all count as engagements in a single project." (Cain, 1). Fundamentally, Fodor's approach to the mind is tempered with his commitments to physicalism and folk psychology; from these two core notions do all of his most radial ideas stem. In fact, spanning this conceptual bridge is what allows Fodor to span philosophy of the mind and cognitive science so compellingly. However, it is not altogether obvious that modularity necessarily demands a causal theory of reference; conceptual role semantics may also be congruous with certain understandings of modularity. So although Fodor's lines of reasoning tend to mutually reinforce one another, it is centrally his leap between physicalism and folk psychology that makes the leap between modularity of the mind and the causal theory of reference.

Fodor's unique devotions to folk psychology and physicalism have allowed his career and writings to last decades because in weaving them together, he has managed to take a traditional, holistic approach to the mind and link it to an empirical philosophical concept. Generally, "The theory of folk psychology purports that our mental states can, in some way, be interpreted in terms of beliefs and desires and that these beliefs and desires can be learned by observing behavior." (McKinlay 1999). This is simply the kind of psychology that everyone tends to engage in on an everyday basis. From observing those around you -- what they say, and how they behave in certain situations -- it is possible to predict and understand their behavior based upon your own mental states and the mental states you perceive others to experience. Folk psychology tends to emphasize intentional states of mind; like beliefs, desires, intentions, expectations, hopes, and fears. These intentional states additionally factor prominently in causal theories of the mind. Environmental factors can cause intentional states of mind. Furthermore, intentional states can also be the cause of other intentional states. Finally, intentional states of mind can directly cause behavior. The apparent advantage of folk psychology in this respect is that it holds the capacity to make broad generalizations about how states of mind interact with each other and the environment based upon common sense. "Hence, there exists a large battery of counterfactual and hypothetical supporting generalizations relating intentional states to one another, to environmental impingements and to behavior." (Cain, 4).

The generalizations regarding states of mind, which people make day-to-day, are significant because their accuracy suggests that most behaviors are the end result of mini-valid lines of reasoning worked through in each individual's mind. For instance, if I hold the belief that anyone at my door with a clipboard is trying to sell me something, and I also know that I have no money, the behavior of not answering the door when an individual with a clipboard appears is readily explained. Accordingly, it is possible for me to express these two mental states to an observer, and subsequently, they would be able to understand my behavior -- if not predict it. Fodor writes, "This parallelism between causal powers and contents engenders what is, surely, one of the most striking facts about the cognitive mind as commonsense belief/desire psychology conceives it: the frequent similarity between trains of thought and arguments." (Fodor 1987, 13). But despite the valid nature of the lines of reasoning human beings construct around intentional states, these arguments cannot invariably be sound. People's beliefs, hopes, and fears may -- and generally are -- based upon insufficient evidence, and accordingly, will vary from person to person depending upon their particular relationship to the external world. This does not eliminate the fact, however, that the major mechanisms by which people arrive at mental states are extremely analogous.

Fodor argues that the reason such a common understanding of the human thought process is applicable is the same reason that certain core scientific theories are accurate (Fodor 1987, 16). The reason this must be true is that scientific theories are merely specific collections of sentences, arranged in a way such that they are readily accepted as valid by nearly all who grasp their meanings. Additionally, since these scientific theories can be applied to the external world, it should not be surprising that general understandings of mental processes can be applied to other individuals. Essentially, observable phenomena in science translate into observable mental states in folk psychology. The accuracy of the core notions of science may be lessened in particular situations, but this does not devalue the core notions; instead, the inaccuracies must be described as variants of the original notion with respect to unique circumstances. Kepler's laws of planetary motion may not be accurate when describing the binding forces of the atom, but this is not because they are wrong and it is not because the forces described are not present: gravity is present in the atom, but its role in describing it is negligible. Consequently, specific instances in which intentional mental states play little or no role in determining human behavior could be devised, but they must be special cases of the underlying themes regarding folk psychology.

Finally, Fodor's form of folk psychology takes into account the realization that people in general cannot have a conscious grasp of exactly the kind of psychology they are engaging in. In other words, people are capable of understanding each other's behavior without being explicitly familiar with the mechanisms they employ to reach that understanding. This anomaly has its analogy in language: most speakers of the English language are able to speak it fluently and grammatically correct without having any formal understanding of its grammatical laws (Cain, 8). "Chomsky has famously argued that the best explanation of such capacities is that speakers of natural languages have a form of unconscious knowledge of the grammar of the language that they speak. Such unconscious knowledge is known as tacit knowledge and is held to be encoded in the brain." (Cain, 8). Recognizing this idea suggests that humans perform a similar sort of computation when making psychological inferences: we understand the causal laws that bind people's intentional states together, and we apply this knowledge without consciously knowing what we are doing.

Overall, Fodor's position regarding folk psychology -- commonsense psychology -- is that its value is evidenced by its accuracy in such an abundance of ordinary situations. However, for such a theory to be meaningful, the intentional states must exist in some physical reality, and they must be in reference to physical objects or ideas:

According to Jerry Fodor, if I believe a, then the representational content of the belief is a, no more than a sentence. Intentional mental states are therefore relations to sentences that organisms stand in. We can only understand intentional states if we accept that beliefs and desires are real, and that they represent intentional mental states in the form of sentences in what Fodor called the language of thought." (Chance 2005).

This interpretation of Fodor's writing illustrates his other major perspective with reference to cognitive science and philosophy of the mind: physicalism. "In a nutshell, physicalism is the doctrine that reality is ultimately physical in nature so that the sum totality of physical facts determines the sum totality of facts." (Cain, 10). This is a rather bold statement without some justifications. From Fodor's point-of-view, it is plausible that a physical description of everything -- the mind in particular -- might be accurate because the most general descriptions of the other branches of science can be put into physical terms. Chemistry, for example, is able to characterize the processes of photosynthesis or the replication of DNA on an atomic scale, but physics can describe the underlying forces that spur such processes and govern their outcomes. The same is true with the biological sciences, meteorological sciences, and geological sciences: they can all be reduced in terms of physics. Additionally, these disciplines tend to have generated the soundest scientific knowledge that human beings have yet acquired; this suggests, that strong adherences to our conception of physics -- consequently, the physical world -- hold the greatest possibility for the acquisition of factual information.

Fodor uses this observation to draw physics outside of the scientific realm and apply it to reality in general. Not only does Fodor endorse the idea that all of the sciences are subsets of physics, but that… READ MORE

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