Fodor advocates a view of cognitive processes as computations defined over the language of thought (or Mentalese). Even among those who endorse Mentalese, considerable controversy surrounds its representational format. What semantically relevant structure should scientific psychology attribute to Mentalese symbols? Researchers commonly emphasize logical structure, akin to that displayed by predicate calculus sentences. To counteract this tendency, I discuss computational models of navigation drawn from probabilistic robotics. These models involve computations defined over cognitive maps, which have geometric rather than logical (...) structure. They thereby demonstrate the possibility of rational cognitive processes in an exclusively non-logical representational medium. Furthermore, they offer much promise for the empirical study of animal navigation. (shrink)

This paper defends a reference-based approach to concept individuation against the objection that such an approach is unable to make sense of concepts that fail to refer. The main line of thought pursued involves clarifying how the referentialist should construe the relationship between a concept's (referential) content and its role in mental processes. While the central goal of the paper is to defend a view aptly titled Concept Referentialism , broader morals are drawn regarding reference-based approaches in general. The paper (...) closes by calling for a shift in the current debate between referentialists and their opponents. (shrink)

[This is an earlier (1997), much longer and more detailed version of my entry on LOTH in the _Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy_] The Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that (...) has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

Internal relations are those relations that are intrinsic to the nature of one or more of the relata. They are a kind of essential relation, rather than an essential property. For example, an arc of a circle is internally related to the center of that circle in the sense that.

A final version of this paper is in press as: Bickhard, M. H.. The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger.

This paper aims at answering the question “When is informational content explicitly represented in a cognitive system?”. I first distinguish the explicitness this question is about from other kinds of explicitness that are currently investigated in philosophy of mind, and situate the components of the question within the various conceptual frameworks that are used to study mental representations. I then present and criticize, on conceptual and empirical grounds, two basic ways of answering the question, the first one coming from the (...) classical computational theory of mind, the latter one issued from a procedural conception of informational contents. I then argue for a new answer to the initial question, an answer that retains some valuable insights of the criticized theories, but which underlines the importance and the interpretational source of the distinctiveness proper to explicitly represented contents. (shrink)

I argue that Stich's Syntactic Theory of Mind (STM) and a naturalistic narrow content functionalism run on a Language of Though story have the same exact structure. I elaborate on the argument that narrow content functionalism is either irremediably holistic in a rather destructive sense, or else doesn't have the resources for individuating contents interpersonally. So I show that, contrary to his own advertisement, Stich's STM has exactly the same problems (like holism, vagueness, observer-relativity, etc.) that he claims plague content-based (...) psychologies. So STM can't be any better than the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) in its prospects for forming the foundations of a scientifically respectable psychology, whether or not RTM has the problems that Stich claims it does. (shrink)

The influence of historical-causal theories of reference developed in the late sixties and early seventies by Donnellan, Kripke, Putnam and Devitt has been so strong that any semantic theory that has the consequence of assigning disjunctive representational content to the mental states of twins (e.g. [H2O or XYZ]) has been thereby taken to refute itself. Similarly, despite the strength of pre-theoretical intuitions that exact physical replicas like Davidson's Swampman have representational mental states, people have routinely denied that they have any (...) intentional/representational states. I want to focus on a particular brand of causal theory that is not historical, the so-called pure informational or nomic covariance theories, and examine how they propose to handle twin cases and replicas like Swampman. In particular, I will take up Fodor. (shrink)

In a series of recent publications Jerry Fodor has attacked what many believe is the core of Darwinian theory of evolution – the theory of natural selection. Not surprisingly, Fodor’s attack has provoked a strong negative reaction. Fodor’s critics have insisted both that his main argument is unsound and that his central claim that the theory of natural selection “can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations” is untenable. I can generally agree with the first part of the (...) launched criticism: Fodor’s “putative argument” does rely on controversial premises which make it unsound. However, I don’t think that Fodor’s critics have succeeded in their attempts to refute his central claim. The refutation strategy that most of them have undertaken is to show examples of successful evolutionary explanations by natural selection. In what follows, two of these examples are put into scrutiny. The analysis reveals that: (1) The theory of natural selection should be only partially credited with the explanatory success of evolutionary explanations by natural selection because these explanations rely on additional empirical hypotheses which might be true or false. That means that the selectionist explanations are fallible statements the truth value of which depends crucially on the truth value of the empirical assumptions which have been premised. (2) In both cases alternative non-selectionist explanations can be found that fit the same empirical data and no reason has been given (or could be given) why these alternative explanations should be ignored a priori as inferior. The observations (1) and (2) stand against the claim that theory of natural selection is the only legitimate explanance for the distribution of phenotypic traits. This does not mean, of course, that natural selection does not play any explanatory role or that the theory of natural selection is a false theory (as Fodor is inclined to argue for). This only means that there is indeed a problem of understanding the proper explanatory role of natural selection and that this problem is not only Fodor’s problem. The paper ends with a suggestion of what should be admitted in order to get to a better understanding of the proper role that the theory of natural selection plays in evolutionary explanations. (shrink)