No wonder philosophers are paid so well. I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. The iPhone is part of my mind already.
Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me. When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind. He consults the notebook, finds the address, and then goes on his way. Such considerations of parity, once we put our bioprejudices aside, reveal the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine.
Such body-and-world involving cycles are best understood. Such cycles supersize the mind. Come to think of it, do minds literally have parts? If so, do some minds have more parts than others? Roughly, how many parts would you say your mind has? Or, try this vignette: Inga asks Otto where the museum is; Otto consults his notebook and tells her.
So it looks as though if Otto loses his notebook, Inga loses part of her mind. Could that be literally true? Even if commonsense psychology marks a distinction here, the question still arises of whether this is an important distinction that ought to be marked in this way.
Let me tell you about my new vacuum cleaner. Unlike my old vacuum cleaner, this one is a sort of robot. Which path it decides to take determines what it happens to pick up.
If it bumps into something the couch as it might be , the shock of the bump causes the robot to turn an arbitrarily determined number of degrees in an arbitrarily selected direction. It then proceeds to vacuum some more and continues to do so, da capo, until somebody remembers to turn it off.
From time to time, it gets trapped behind things, or under things, and sometimes it gets tangled up in a fringe; but, by and large, it works pretty well. This kind of consideration, however, cannot distinguish the cases in the way Fodor requires.
Think of the case where, to solve a problem, I first conjure a mental image, then inspect it to check or to read off a result. In each case we have a process that, while fully internal, involves the careful construction, manipulation and subsequent consultation of representations whose meaning is a matter of convention. These glasses work by matching the current scene a face, for example to stored information and cueing the subject with relevant information a name, a relationship.
The cue may be overt consciously perceived by the subject or covert rapidly flashed and hence subliminally presented. Interestingly, in the covert case, functionality is improved without any process of conscious consultation on the part of the subject. Now imagine a case in which the same cueing is robustly achieved by means of a hard-wired connection to the brain.
In that case, the argument would go, the dictionary is a sort of temporary adjunct or prosthesis of my mind It's a slow way of extending your understanding of English - and indeed using the dictionary as a mnemonic isn't the same as offloading your entire understanding of Chinese into a book.
I couldn't see you, say, writing a poem in Chinese if all the "Chinese you" was in a book you had to look up in a very complicated way in order to work out any specific response. But I'm pretty sure this is just a matter of the way we're trying to explain these concepts.
I doubt we have a substantive disagreement : I look forward to another entry into Adam Roberts' plan to write every sf story there is! I hadn't thought of "original sin" stories as a category, but it makes sense! Post a Comment. Monday, 23 February Where is my mind? The view that, as David Chalmers puts it: I bought an iPhone.
Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Of course, if concepts were prototypes then it would follow that concept acquisition would be an inductive process.
Instead, Fodor suggests that learning a prototype is a stage in the acquisition of a concept. His picture thus looks like this , p. Why think that P1 is an inductive process? What kind of process is it? Instead, there are innate mechanisms, which take us from the acquisition of prototypes to the acquisition of concepts. Perceptual illusions provide a nice illustration. Figure 1. Thus, there must be limits on how much information is available to the visual system for use in perceptual inferences.
In other words, vision must be in some interesting sense modular. Fodor spells out a number of characteristic features of modules. Fodor says:. That is, the confirmation function for input systems does not have access to all the information that the organism internally represents.
In addition to these features, Fodor also suggests that modules are associated with fixed neural architecture , exhibit characteristic and specific breakdown patterns , and have an ontogeny that exhibits a characteristic pace and sequencing , pp. The latter exhibit none of the characteristic features associated with modules since they are domain-general, unencapsulated, under our voluntary control, slow, and not associated with fixed neural structures.
The Fodorean mind is thus essentially a big general-purpose computer, with a number of domain-specific computers out near the edges that feed into it. In addition, evolutionary psychologists claim that these central modules are adaptations , that is, products of selection pressures that faced our hominid ancestors.
That Fodor is a staunch nativist might lead one to believe that he is sympathetic to applying adaptationist reasoning to the human mind. This would be a mistake. Fodor rejects this latter inference, and claims that natural selection is not required in order to underwrite claims about the teleology of the mind. Indeed, in general, one does not need to know about the evolutionary history of a system in order to make inferences about its function:.
One might thus guess that hands are for grasping, eyes for seeing, or even that minds are for thinking, without knowing or caring much about their history of selection. Compare Pinker , p. It is, in particular, morally certain that Harvey never read Darwin.
Likewise, the phylogeny of bird flight is still a live issue in evolutionary theory. But, I suppose, the first guy to figure out what birds use their wings for lived in a cave.
Evolutionary psychologists also argue that the adaptive complexity of the mind is best explained by the hypothesis that it is a collection of adaptations. For natural selection is the only known explanation for adaptive complexity in the living world.
About that, however, nothing is known. Fodor thus argues that adaptive complexity does not warrant the claim that our minds are products of natural selection. In a co-authored book with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong , Fodor goes much further, arguing that adaptationist explanations in general are both decreasingly of interest in biology and, on further reflection, actually incoherent. Perhaps needless to say, the book has occasioned considerable controversy see Sober , Pigliucci , Block and Kitcher , and Godfrey-Smith ; Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini reply to their critics in an afterword in the paperback edition of the book.
One of the main jobs of the central system is the fixation of belief via abductive inferences, and Fodor argues that the fact that such inferences are holistic, global, and context-dependent implies that they cannot be realized in a modular system. Consider, for instance, the simplicity of a belief. Whether or not a belief complicates a plan thus depends upon the beliefs involved in the plan—that is, the simplicity of a belief is one of its global, context-dependent properties.
However, the syntactic properties of representations are local , in the sense that they depend on their intrinsic , context-independent properties. Fodor concludes that to the extent that cognition involves global properties of representations, RTM cannot provide a model of how cognition works:.
Indeed, I think that, as things now stand, this and consciousness look to be the ultimate mysteries about the mind. Thus, although Fodor has long championed RTM as the best theory of cognition available, he claims that its application is limited to those portions of the mind that are modular.
Bradley Rives Email: rives iup. Jerry A. Fodor — Jerry Fodor was one of the most important philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Physicalism, Functionalism, and the Special Sciences Throughout his career Fodor endorsed physicalism, the claim that all the genuine particulars and properties in the world are either identical to or in some sense determined by and dependent upon physical particulars and properties.
The following passage is typical: Common sense psychology works so well it disappears. The Representational Theory of Mind For physicalists, accepting that there are mental states that are both intentional and causal raises the question of how such states can exist in a physical world.
As Fodor puts it: [I]f you start out with a true thought, and you proceed to do some thinking, it is very often the case that the thoughts that thinking leads you to will also be true. As Fodor puts it: So we can now maybe explain how thinking could be both rational and mechanical. Content and Concepts Suppose, as RTM suggests, that mental processes are computational processes, and that this explains how rational relations between thoughts can be realized by purely casual relations among symbols in the brain.
As Fodor puts it: [P]eople can have radically false theories and really crazy views, consonant with our understanding perfectly well, thank you, which false views they have and what radically crazy things it is that they believe.
As Fodor and Pylyshyn put it: Frege just took for granted that, since coextensive thoughts concepts can be distinct, it must be difference in their intensions that distinguish them. Nativism In The Language of Thought , Fodor argued not only in favor of RTM but also in favor of the much more controversial view that all lexical concepts are innate. As Ray Jackendoff puts it: Nearly everyone thinks that learning anything consists of constructing it from previously known parts, using previously known means of combination.
Fodor sums up his view as follows: [I]f the locking story about concept possession and the mind-dependence story about the metaphysics of doorknobhood are both true, then the kind of nativism about DOORKNOB that an informational atomist has to put up with is perhaps not one of concepts but of mechanisms.
However, Fodor says: [T]he inductive evaluation of that hypothesis itself requires inter alia bringing the property green or triangular before the mind as such. Fodor says: [T]he claim that input systems are informationally encapsulated is equivalent to the claim that the data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less that the organism may know. Indeed, in general, one does not need to know about the evolutionary history of a system in order to make inferences about its function: [O]ne can often make a pretty shrewd guess what an organ is for on the basis of entirely synchronic considerations.
The Adapted Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, H. Block, Ned Boghossian, Paul Evans, Gareth Varieties of Reference.
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