Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science

by Jerry A. Fodor

Book Overview

A collection of eleven essays dealing with methodological and empirical issues in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind, Representations convincingly connects philosophical speculation to concrete empirical research. One of the outstanding methodological issues dealt with is the status of functionalism considered as an alternative to behavioristic and physicalistic accounts. of mental states and properties. The other issue is the status...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262060795
• ISBN13: 9780262060790
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 343 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Philosophy must respect cognitive science

The mind-body problem is of relatively recent vintage in Western philosophy, but it has become of importance of late due to the role it plays in the "strong A.I." problem. Although the field of artificial intelligence is no where near to creating thinking machines, let alone conscious ones, the debate over whether the latter is indeed possible has been raging now for several decades. Sometimes philosophy raises and debates issues that have no immediate practical significance, and the possibility of "strong A.I." is currently one of these. But developments in A.I. may indeed make these discussion not as vacuous as they currently are, and so it may in some sense be helpful to analyze some of these arguments, with also the hope that they can shed light on the nature of intelligence and help those who are interested in the building of an artificial mind. The author considers his book a blending of three ideas, namely functionalism, intensionality, and mental representation. He introduces these via a consideration of the arguments against Cartesian dualism that were being formulated in the early 1960's. The author labels "logical behaviorism" and "central state identity theory" as being two of the strategies for doing this. In logical behaviorism, mental processes are semantically equivalent to behavioral dispositions, and the definitions of these reduced to that of stimulus and response parameters, these parameters left essentially undefined. The author gives counterexamples to show that logical behaviorism falls short of being a theory of mental causation that allows nontrivial psychological theories to be constructed. Throughout the book, the author makes the requirement that a science of mind must define mental properties in a way that makes them natural from the standpoint of psychological theory construction. He makes the point, interestingly, that information processing systems can provide a natural domain for this kind of theory construction. He thus admits the possibility that these systems can share our psychology but not share our physical make-up. He sums this up by saying that "philosophical theories about the nature of mental properties carry empirical commitments about the appropriate domains for psychological generalizations". Physicalism does not meet these requirements he states. The author thus asserts the need for a "relational" treatment of mental properties, and so he turns his attention to "functionalism". Along with stimulus/response, this theory also allows reference to other mental states. But functionalism is not a reductionist philosophy like behaviorism, for it admits mentalistic concepts, and these are relationally defined and causal. It thus allows psychological theory construction of the kind that a psychologist requires. However, the author is careful to note that functionalism must deal with two problems, one being the development of a vocabulary which specifies the allowed kinds of descriptions for causes and effec