Phil 473/673: Fodor and RTM

Administrivia

Updated syllabus online ' Greg next week's presentation

Persistence of the Attitudes: Background

What are 'attitudes'? Belief, desire, hunch, etc. Attitudes towards what? Propositions. How do you pick them out? By stating their content. What is content? What a proposition is about, what it means. E.g. when I believe that it is raining, the proposition is 'it is raining', my attitude is 'belief', the content is that it's raining.
That is, the verb ('believes') expresses a relation between an agent (me) and an object (the proposition 'it is raining'). So, there are two problems here: 1. What is the nature of that relation i.e. how do states of mind set up such relations; and 2. What is the object picked out (and how) by the proposition.
Propositions are objects with truth conditions that must be statisfied in order for the representation with that proposition as its content to be correct. Generally they are taken to be complex objects (like those in first order logic) possible composed of other complex objects. The fundamental constituents might be Fregean senses, or individuals and properties, etc. In these cases, truth conditions would be determined by the content. Alternatively, some think the content of the proposition is the truth conditions.
What is 'folk psychology'; or what Fodor calls 'good old commonsense belief/desire psychology'? The implicit theory in every day personal intercourse that guides our explanations and predictions about what people do. The rules are many, and imperfect generalizations. The entities that are governed by the rules are propositional attitudes and result in actions.
What is RTM? Representational theory of mind. What does it claim? 1. That to believe something is to have a mental symbol that means that something in your 'belief box' (there are other 'boxes' for other attitudes). 2. Mental processes are causal chains of rules operating on mental symbols.
What does 'ceteris paribus' mean? 'other things being equal'. How does Fodor use it? He uses it to not the ways in which many scientific generalizations are generally true, not always true.
What are the 'special sciences'? Everything but physics; e.g., psychology, geology, biology, etc.

The Targets

What position is Fodor arguing against?
Associationism (p. 18): View of mental activity based on Locke's (17^th c.) empiricist philosophy. The central idea is that ideas are connected to one another by contiguity or synchrony, not logic. Thus there is no 'innate structure' as for Fodor. Ideas are 'associated' through learning. There are strong connections between this historical movement and contemporary connectionism. Problem: Laws of association can't explain rational thought. Why?
Churchland and Stich: Folk psychology is sterile. 'Eliminativism' is better. Eliminativism is the view that folk psychological entities (like beliefs and desires) will be eliminated from our vocabulary once we really understand how the brain works (or at least from scientifically respectable vocabulary). So folk psychology on this view isn't just incomplete, it's totally inaccurate and gets the relevant states and processes wrong (so there can't be a reduction of folk psychology to neuroscience). Analogous to the elimination of notions like 'phlogiston' (which was once used to explain burning) or the Greek gods. Argument (see Stich's article in MITECS): 1. 'belief, desire, etc. are theoretical posits of folk psych' 2. 'That theory is incoherent, inconsistent, or false' 3. Therefore, those states either shouldn't be referred to by scientific explanations or don't exist. For 2.: FP relies on quasi-linguistic states but a) animals and children don't have language but must have thoughts b) neuroscience hasn't found any such structured states. OR: FP assumes 'conceptual modularity' i.e. that 'potato' is the same in every context (c.f. 'hot potato' or 'couch potato'), but this isn't true for some neurologically inspired models of concepts. OR Content of beliefs is wide, which means it won't help with psych explanations (see Twin Earth discussions). OR These terms can't be naturalized, so we should do away with them (like the Greek gods).
Dennett: 'Instrumentalism' about beliefs/desires. This is the view that it's useful to talk about beliefs but there aren't really such things in the head. Just as we know 'get the queen out' isn't in the computer, but it's useful to describe its behaviour that way so all of our beliefs are just this kind of 'useful fiction'. That is we take a particularly useful 'stance' (the 'intentional stance') towards such complex systems (though this may not be an strictly instrumentalist position).

The Arguments

Folk Psychology

' Depth: FP (folk psychology) has a deductive structure like that of other special sciences. This means it posits 'hidden variables' that enter into causal relations to produce the results we see. As well, the rules of the science interact in many varied ways (e.g. When someone grabs something, they want it. When they want it, they will go to certain lengths to get it. Going to those lengths leads to certain kinds of behaviour. So we should expect those kinds of behaviour. Notice there is a chain of reasoning here).

' Indispensability: It's the only currently viable alternative! What's another? We need it to get around in our complex social environment.

RTM

' Empirical success: Current psychology assumes it. That psychology has been quite successful, therefore we should assume it has something pretty much right about the world.

' Explains semantic/causal parallelism: Reliance on computer metaphor gives us ideas about how causal relations (machines moving around physical objects (symbols)) can preserve semantic ones (if the propositions that are meant by the symbols are true, so also the results of the moving around of them will be). This means that the rules that govern the moving of symbols are valid. We can simply observe the striking relation between trains of thought and good (i.e., sound) arguments (valid connections of true propositions). Thus we are caused to think in semantically consistent ways.

' What does Fodor think the great breakthrough of cognitive science is? The mind as computer analogy because computers can manipulate the syntax ('shape') of symbols that respects semantics ('meaning') of those symbols. That is, it shows how a machine can manipulate meaningful states.

' Against instrumentalism: Dennett points to a rule, not something we know is represented by the system. Rules, of course, can be implicit, innate, and thus not explicitly represented. In general, rules can be implicit but representations can't be. (Of course, instrumentalists think both are).

' Against eliminativism: Indispensability, how often it works, explanatory successes of psychology.

Some Comments

Results from cognitive anthropology: E.g. some south Asian cultures don't distinguish the intention to act from not intending to act. I.e. you can't 'not mean to' do something. So, folk psychology can look quite different across cultures. Thus, we might want to be careful about the kinds of conclusions we draw based on one particular folk psychology. (c.f. p. 15)
What kind of cognitive science is Fodor doing? Note he posits a 'language of thought', much like natural language. This is classical cognitive science, allied strongly to GOFAI (Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence).