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Language, Thought and Compositionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

Jerry Fodor
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Extract

Consider the task under which I labour: These are supposed to be talks in the millennial spirit. My charge is to find, somewhere in the philosophical landscape, a problem of whose current status I can give some coherent account, and to point the direction in which it seems to me that further research might usefully proceed, And I'm to try to sound reasonably cheerful and optimistic in the course of doing so. No sooner did I begin to ponder these terms of engagement, than it occurred to me that cheer and optimism aren't really my thing; also that I hadn't heard of a topic in the philosophy of mind (which is the only part of philosophy that even I think that I know anything about) which seems to me to be other than a godawful mess. It struck me that my best course would be for me to change my name and go into hiding. Thus my first choice of a title for this lecture, which was ‘To Be Announced’.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 48 , September 2001 , pp. 227 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2001

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References

1 Peacocke, C. (2000): ‘Fodor on concepts, philosophical aspects’, Mind and Language, 15, 327–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The difference between them matters primarily in polemical contexts where an argument is required for the compositionality of a representational system that is not granted to be productive. See (Fodor, J. and Pylyshyn, Z., 1988): ‘Connectionism and cognitive architecture’, Cognition, 28, 3–71.

3 More precisely, ditto for thoughts assuming that the representational theory of mind is true.

4 For extensive discussion of these issues, see Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford University Press, 1998), chapters 4 and 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 A version of this paper appears in the journal Mind and Language, Vol. 16, No. 1, February 2001.