Switch to: References

Citations of:

Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics

Cambridge: Blackwell (1990)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. The Linguistic Determination of Conscious Thought Contents.Agustín Vicente & Marta Jorba - 2017 - Noûs (3):737-759.
    In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Broken Technologies.Fernando Flores Morador (ed.) - 2011-2015 - Lund: Lund University.
    There are many possible definitions of “technology” and I will discuss some of these in this book. However, in this introduction let me use a definition of Svante Lindqvist who defines technology very intuitively as “those activities, directed towards the satisfaction of human wants, which produce change in the material world.” He says also “the distinction between human “wants” and more limited human “needs” is crucial, for we do not use technology only to satisfy our essential material requirements.” Consequently, from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Has Fodor Really Changed His Mind on Narrow Content?Murat Aydede - 1997 - Mind and Language 12 (3-4):422-458.
    In The Elm and the Expert (1994), Fodor rejects the notion of narrow content as superfluous. He envisions a scientific intentional psychology that adverts only to broad content properties in its explanations. I show that there has been no change in Fodor's treatment of Frege cases and cases involving the so‐called deferential concepts. And for good reason: his notion of narrow content (1985‐91) couldn't explain them. The only apparent change concerns his treatment of Twin Earth cases. However, I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • (1 other version)Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings.David John Chalmers (ed.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
    What is the mind? Is consciousness a process in the brain? How do our minds represent the world? Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of consciousness, and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   65 citations  
  • Innate a nd Learned: Carey, Mad Dog Nativism, and the Poverty of Stimuli and Analogies.Georges Rey - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (2):109-132.
    In her recent (2009) book, The Origins of Concepts, Susan Carey argues that what she calls ‘Quinean Bootstrapping’ and processes of analogy in children show that the expressive power of a mind can be increased in ways that refute Jerry Fodor's (1975, 2008) ‘Mad Dog’ view that all concepts are innate. I argue that it is doubtful any evidence about the manifestation of concepts in children will bear upon the logico-semantic issues of expressive power. Analogy and bootstrapping may be ways (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • the wages of sin.Palma Apg Palma - 1995 - Intellectica 1995 (2).
    the purity of functionalism with mind may clash with a the need for .
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Norms of intentionality: norms that don’t guide.Benjamin W. Jarvis - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 157 (1):1-25.
    More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Concept referentialism and the role of empty concepts.Kevan Edwards - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (1):89-118.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Retracing our steps: Fodor’s new old way with concept acquisition. [REVIEW]John Sarnecki - 2006 - Acta Analytica 21 (40):41-73.
    The acquisition of concepts has proven especially difficult for philosophers and psychologists to explain. In this paper, I examine Jerry Fodor’s most recent attempt to explain the acquisition of concepts relative to experiences of their referents. In reevaluating his earlier position, Fodor attempts to co-opt informational semantics into an account of concept acquisition that avoids the radical nativism of his earlier views. I argue that Fodor’s attempts ultimately fail to be persuasive. He must either accept his earlier nativism or adopt (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Functionalism, computationalism, and mental contents.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (3):375-410.
    Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the metaphysics of mental states and the functional relations between them, we should reject these assumptions. # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   41 citations  
  • Motivation and Emotion: An Interactive Process Model.Mark H. Bickhard - 2000 - In Ralph D. Ellis (ed.), The Caldron of Consciousness: Motivation, Affect and Self-Organization. John Benjamins. pp. 161.
    In this chapter, I outline dynamic models of motivation and emotion. These turn out not to be autonomous subsystems, but, instead, are deeply integrated in the basic interactive dynamic character of living systems. Motivation is a crucial aspect of particular kinds of interactive systems -- systems for which representation is a sister aspect. Emotion is a special kind of partially reflective interaction process, and yields its own emergent motivational aspects. In addition, the overall model accounts for some of the crucial (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • The connectionism/classicism battle to win souls.Brian P. McLaughlin - 1993 - Philosophical Studies 71 (2):163-190.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • (1 other version)Computation and Functionalism: Syntactic Theory of Mind Revisited.Murat Aydede - 2005 - In G. Irzik & Güven Güzeldere (eds.), Turkish Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Springer.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • How to acquire a concept.Eric Margolis - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (3):347-369.
    In this paper, I develop a novel account of concept acquisition for an atomistic theory of concepts. Conceptual atomism is rarely explored in cognitive science because of the feeling that atomistic treatments of concepts are inherently nativistic. My model illustrates, on the contrary, that atomism does not preclude the learning of a concept.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   84 citations  
  • The content and acquisition of lexical concepts.Richard Horsey - 2006
    This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Sensational sentences switched.Georges Rey - 1992 - Philosophical Studies 68 (3):289 - 319.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   110 citations  
  • Language of thought: The connectionist contribution.Murat Aydede - 1997 - Minds and Machines 7 (1):57-101.
    Fodor and Pylyshyn's critique of connectionism has posed a challenge to connectionists: Adequately explain such nomological regularities as systematicity and productivity without postulating a "language of thought" (LOT). Some connectionists like Smolensky took the challenge very seriously, and attempted to meet it by developing models that were supposed to be non-classical. At the core of these attempts lies the claim that connectionist models can provide a representational system with a combinatorial syntax and processes sensitive to syntactic structure. They are not (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • (1 other version)Intentionality and naturalism.Stephen P. Stich & Stephen Laurence - 1994 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1):159-82.
    ...the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives not from such relatively technical worries about individualism and holism as we.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Pure informational semantics and the narrow/broad dichotomy.Murat Aydede - 1997 - In Dunja Jutronić (ed.), The Maribor papers in naturalized semantics. Maribor: Pedagoška fakulteta Maribor. pp. 157.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Tecnologías rotas.Fernando Morador (ed.) - 2009 - Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press.
    Existen muchas definiciones posibles de “tecnología” y discutiré algunas de estas en este libro. Sin embargo, en esta introducción, usaré una definición intuitiva de tecnología: "aquellas actividades, dirigidas hacia la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas, "que producen cambios en el mundo material". En consecuencia, desde esta perspectiva, una tecnología "rota" podría definirse como aquellas actividades, dirigidas hacia la satisfacción de los deseos humanos destinados a producir cambios en el mundo material que no logran satisfacer estos deseos o no producen cambios (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The best test theory of extension: First principle(s).Robert D. Rupert - 1999 - Mind and Language 14 (3):321–355.
    This paper presents the leading idea of my doctoral dissertation and thus has been shaped by the reactions of all the members of my thesis committee: Charles Chastain, Walter Edelberg, W. Kent Wilson, Dorothy Grover, and Charles Marks. I am especially grateful for the help of Professors Chastain, Edelberg, and Wilson; each worked closely with me at one stage or another in the development of the ideas contained in the present work. Shorter versions of this paper were presented at the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • The biological foundations of cognitive science.Mark H. Bickhard - manuscript
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • (Nonsolipsistic) conceptual role semantics.Gilbert Harman - 1987 - In Ernest LePore (ed.), New directions in semantics. Orlando: Academic Press. pp. 55–81.
    CRS says that the meanings of expressions of a language or other symbol system or the contents of mental states are determined and explained by the way symbols are used in thinking. According to CRS one.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   124 citations  
  • Deconstructing Dennett’s Darwin.Jerry Fodor - 1996 - Mind and Language 11 (3):246-262.
    Daniel Dennett’s book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, offers a naturalistic teleology and a theory of the intentionality of the mental. Both are grounded in a neo-Darwinian account of evolutionary adaptation. I argue that Dennett’s empirical assumptions about the evolution of psychological phenotypes may well be unwarranted; and that, in any event, the intentionality of minds is quite different from, and not reducible to, the intensionality of selection.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   27 citations  
  • LOT, CTM, and the Elephant in the Room.Susan Schneider - 2009 - Synthese 170 (2):235 - 250.
    According to the language of thought (LOT) approach and the related computational theory of mind (CTM), thinking is the processing of symbols in an inner mental language that is distinct from any public language. Herein, I explore a deep problem at the heart of the LOT/CTM program—it has yet to provide a plausible conception of a mental symbol.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Names, contents, and causes.Fred Adams & Gary Fuller - 1992 - Mind and Language 7 (3):205-21.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • On the relationship between naturalistic semantics and individuation criteria for terms in a language of thought.Robert D. Rupert - 1998 - Synthese 117 (1):95-131.
    Naturalistically minded philosophers hope to identify a privileged nonsemantic relation that holds between a mental representation m and that which m represents, a relation whose privileged status underwrites the assignment of reference to m. The naturalist can accomplish this task only if she has in hand a nonsemantic criterion for individuating mental representations: it would be question-begging for the naturalist to characterize m, for the purpose of assigning content, as 'the representation with such and such content'. If we individuate mental (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • (1 other version)Systematicity, Conceptual Truth, and Evolution.Brian P. McLaughlin - 1993 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34:217-234.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • (1 other version)Higher-order theories of consciousness.Peter Carruthers - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • Narrow mental content.Curtis Brown - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Narrow mental content is a kind of mental content that does not depend on an individual's environment. Narrow content contrasts with “broad” or “wide” content, which depends on features of the individual's environment as well as on features of the individual. It is controversial whether there is any such thing as narrow content. Assuming that there is, it is also controversial what sort of content it is, what its relation to ordinary or “broad” content is, and how it is determined (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  • Mental Explicitness: The Case of Representational Contents.Pierre Steiner - 2005 - Abstracta 2 (1):3-23.
    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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Learning to think: A response to the language of thought argument for innateness.Christopher Viger - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (3):313-25.
    Jerry Fodor's argument for an innate language of thought continues to be a hurdle for researchers arguing that natural languages provide us with richer conceptual systems than our innate cognitive resources. I argue that because the logical/formal terms of natural languages are given a usetheory of meaning, unlike predicates, logical/formal terms might be learned without a mediating internal representation. In that case, our innate representational system might have less logical structure than a natural language, making it possible that we augment (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Epistemic boundedness and the universality of thought.Matthew Rellihan - 2005 - Philosophical Studies 125 (2):219-250.
    Fodor argues that our minds must have epistemic limitations because there must be endogenous constraints on the class of concepts we can acquire. However, his argument for the existence of these endogenous constraints is falsified by the phenomenon of the deferential acquisition of concepts. If we allow for the acquisition of concepts through deferring to experts and scientific instruments, then our conceptual capacity will be without endogenous constraints, and there will be no reason to think that our minds are epistemically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Critical principles: on the negative side.Mark H. Bickhard - 2002 - New Ideas in Psychology 20:1-34.
    neglected aspect: knowledge of error, or ‘‘negative’’ knowledge. The development of knowledge of what counts as error occurs via a kind of internal variation and selection, or quasi-evolutionary, process. Processes of reflection generate a hierarchy of principles of error.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • (1 other version)A guide to naturalizing semantics.Barry M. Loewer - 1997 - In Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 108-126.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   90 citations  
  • Locking on to the language of thought.Christopher David Viger - 2001 - Philosophical Psychology 14 (2):203-215.
    I demonstrate that locking on, a key notion in Jerry Fodor's most recent theory of content, supplemented informational atomism (SIA), is cashed out in terms of asymmetric dependence, the central notion in his earlier theory of content. I use this result to argue that SIA is incompatible with the language of thought hypothesis because the constraints on the causal relations into which symbols can enter imposed by the theory of content preclude the causal relations needed between symbols for them to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Narrow content, context of thought, and asymmetric dependence.Paul Bernier - 1993 - Mind and Language 8 (3):327-42.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Intencionalidad y significado: seis problemas de la relación entre el pensamiento y el lenguaje.Juan José Acero - 2002 - Azafea: Revista de Filosofia 4 (1).
    ¿Qué relaciones hay entre la intencionalidad -el contenido- de los conceptos y pensamientos y el significado -el contenido- de las palabras y oraciones? El presente artículo analiza esta cuestión distinguiendo en ella seis problemas diferentes que atienden a la naturaleza primitiva de la intencionalidad de lo mental, su expresión, el papel del lenguaje o de las instituciones lingüísticas en las condiciones de individuación del contenido mental. Una vez separados unos de otros esos seis problemas, el artículo llama la atención sobre (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Representing as Adapting.Benjamin Jarvis - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (1):17-39.
    In this paper, I recommend a creature-level theory of representing. On this theory, a creature represents some entity just in case the creature adapts its behavior to that entity. Adapting is analyzed in terms of establishing new patterns of behavior. The theory of representing as adapting is contrasted with traditional causal and informational theories of mental representation. Moreover, I examine the theory in light of Putnam-Burge style externalism; I show that Putnam-Burge style externalism follows from and is explained by it. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Real Knowledge. The problem of content in neural epistemics.J. J. M. Sleutels - unknown
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • (1 other version)Systematicity, conceptual truth, and evolution.Brian P. McLaughlin - 1992 - Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences 34:217-234.
    Smolensky's (1995) proposal for a connectionist explanation of systematicity doesn't work.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Nonconceptual Content: From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational States.José Luis Bermúdez - 1995 - Mind and Language 10 (4):333-369.
    Philosophers have often argued that ascriptions of content are appropriate only to the personal level states of folk psychology. Against this, this paper defends the view that the familiar propositional attitudes and states defined over them are part of a larger set of cognitive proceses that do not make constitutive reference to concept possession. It does this by showing that states with nonconceptual content exist both in perceptual experience and in subpersonal information-processing systems. What makes these states content-involving is their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   98 citations  
  • Fodor's information semantics between naturalism and mentalism.Theo C. Meyering - 1997 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 40 (2):187-207.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Fodor on Causes of Mentalese Symbols.Tevfik Aytekin–Erdinç Sayan - 2012 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 19 (1):3-15.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Concepts and Perceptual Belief: How (Not) to Defend Recognitional Concepts.Bradley Rives - 2010 - Acta Analytica 25 (4):369-391.
    Recognitional concepts have the following characteristic property: thinkers are disposed to apply them to objects merely on the basis of undergoing certain perceptual experiences. I argue that a prominent strategy for defending the existence of constitutive connections among concepts, which appeals to thinkers’ semantic-cum-conceptual intuitions, cannot be used to defend the existence of recognitional concepts. I then outline and defend an alternative argument for the existence of recognitional concepts, which appeals to certain psychological laws.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Three Views of Language & the Mind.Submitted May - unknown
    The essay which follows is about the relationship between mind and language. Most recent thought about intentionality has it that (i) mental states of individuals are largely, or in the most fundamental cases, independent of social facts about public languages, and (ii) these social facts are derived from, or constituted by, the mental states of individuals. The purpose of this essay is to challenge this individualist orthodoxy (as well as the view of the relationship between mind and action which often (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Concepts: Where Fodor went wrong.A. Levine & Mark H. Bickhard - 1999 - Philosophical Psychology 12 (1):5-23.
    In keeping with other recent efforts, Fodor's CONCEPTS focuses on the metaphysics of conceptual content, bracketing such epistemological questions as, "How can we know the contents of our concepts?" Fodor's metaphysical account of concepts, called "informational atomism," stipulates that the contents of a subject's concepts are fixed by the nomological lockings between the subject and the world. After sketching Fodor's "what else?" argument in support of this view, we offer a number of related criticisms. All point to the same conclusion: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • The Emergence of Contentful Experience.Mark H. Bickhard - 2001 - In Tadashi Kitamura (ed.), What Should Be Computed to Understand and Model Brain Function?: From Robotics, Soft Computing, Biology and Neuroscience to Cognitive Philosophy. World Scientific.
    There are many facets to mental life and mental experience. In this chapter, I attempt to account for some central characteristics among those facets. I argue that normative function and representation are emergent in particular forms of the self-maintenance of far from thermodynamic equilibrium systems in their essential far-from-equilibrium conditions. The nature of representation that is thereby modeled.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Rashness of Traditional Rationalism and Empiricism.Georges Rey - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1):227-258.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Misrepresentation and Robustness of Meaning.Tevfik Aytekin–Erdinç Sayan - 2010 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 17 (1):21-38.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark