Taxonomy: Psychological and Biological

Abstract

This book contains something for the inveterate Fodor-watcher as well as the part-time dabbler in the philosophy of psychology. The rift that has sundered philosophical theorizing about the mind for the past couple of decades (the seismic event being the 1975 publication of Hilary Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ”) has pitted advocates of “narrow” mental content against those of “wide” content. The divisive issue is whether an agent’s mental states should be individuated purely by reference to their intrinsic causal powers, or whether they should be picked out according to their etiology or causal history. Anyone who still thinks of Fodor as the archetypal “methodological solipsist” in the philosophy of mind is in for a surprise, since his express aim here is to cast doubt on the narrow mode of individuation and to vindicate the opposing position. Fodor’s evolution has not taken place overnight; he has come gradually to subscribe to “informational semantics”, which picks out mental states according to their extrinsic causes, actual or possible. For readers who are already familiar with this gradual about-face, there are other surprises in store here in the various ingenious and audacious moves that Fodor makes on behalf of the wide mode of individuation. Fodor begins this brief monograph, which is based on a series of inaugural Jean Nicod Lectures delivered in Paris in 1993, by posing a problem for himself. The problem arises because of a certain tension between two ideas to which he is committed and which he takes to be central to the effort to putting psychology on a solid scientific footing, complete with intentional laws. The first is that intentional content reduces to information (which is a bona fide scientific or naturalized notion), and the second is that psychological laws are implemented by computational processes. The tension exists because the process of computation merely transforms one symbol into another based on the intrinsic causal powers of those symbols, whereas the information carried by a thought is a function of its (acutal or possible) causal history. It seems mysterious how these two things could remain “in phase” in such a way