Computation and Functionalism: Syntactic Theory of Mind Revisited

Abstract

This question has been haunting people working in the field since the publication of a paper by Stich in 1978 in which he gave his celebrated ‘‘autonomy argument’’. Then, as everybody knows, came Fodor’s notorious ‘‘Methodological Solipsism’’ in 1980, in which he argued for the formality condition: namely, thought processes are causal sequences of symbol tokenings in one’s language of thought (LOT), and the causal processes are sensitive only to the syntactic/formal properties of its symbols. Hence, he argued against what he called a ‘‘naturalistic psychology,’’ i.e. a psychology whose laws essentially advert to broad semantic properties of mental states they cover. The alternative, rationalist psychology, according to Fodor, was to advert only to formal characteristics of symbols, of which Fodor conceived as narrow computational roles of LOT symbols. Stich’s 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, was the culmination of the worries. He turned these into a sustained argument against the possibility of a scientific intentional psychology (along with the common sense belief-desire psychology), and at the same time, for a syntactic way of doing psychology, i.e., for his Syntactic Theory of Mind (STM). He defended an eliminativist stance: STM involves the elimination of all intentional idioms proposed to be used in a scientific enterprise, hence it envisions a scientific psychology free of semantics. STM has been around for almost two decades now. It has generated a lot of discussion because it has usually been taken to articulate the paradox alleged to underlie the LOTH,