Abstract
Jerry Fodor, the long-time proponent of the Language of Thought hypothesis has published a widely condemned book at the end of his life, criticising Darwin’s theory of natural selection. It has been argued (by Alex Rosenberg, among others) that this is not just some kind of quirk or a result of Fodor’s idiosyncratic aging process, but a direct consequence of Fodor’s general theoretical commitments. And this is where Csaba Pléh fares much better than Fodor. Pléh’s general theoretical commitments were very similar to Fodor’s inasmuch as he also endorsed a fairly strong version of the Fodorian Language of Thought framework. But Pléh’s continuing fascination with, and use of, evolutionary arguments show how one can leave behind the Language of Thought hypothesis and opt for more dynamic evolutionary approaches to the mind.
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Notes
- 1.
This way of putting what a representation represents is Dretske’s (1995). Millikan’s teleological theory of mental content is of course different from this (at least in her first book), but she point out the equivalence between the structure of these two versions of teleological theories in her Millikan (2001), where she reformulates her theory in the Dretskean way. For simplicity, I will use this Dretskean terminology in what follows.
- 2.
Dretske emphasizes that this relation does not need to be nomological, nor does it need to be based on a causal relation (Dretske 1988).
- 3.
In this paper, I will presuppose that the notion of function teleological theories use is an aetiological one. Boorse (1976), Cummins (1975), Godfrey-Smith (1994), Griffiths (1993), Millikan (1984, 1993), Neander (1991a, b), Wright (1973, 1976). See also Bigelow and Pargetter (1987), Walsh (1996), Mills and Beatty (1979) for alternative definitions. I questioned this assumption and examined the different definitions of function in detail in Nanay (2010, 2012, 2013a).
- 4.
Note that Brecht-sentence is misquoted, Morale is not a German word, nor does it rhyme in the original Brecht poem. The correct rendering is: “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” Fodor was incredibly touchy about having misquoted Brecht….
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Nánay, B. (2022). Between Fodor and Darwin. In: Gervain, J., Csibra, G., Kovács, K. (eds) A Life in Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_12
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