[Wittrs] Re: Meaning, Intent and Reference (Parsing Fodor?)

  • From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:36:14 -0000

--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "jrstern" <jrstern@...> wrote:

> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@> wrote:
> >
> > > The short version is that there must be a "language of thought",
> > > Wittgenstein to the contrary, and that the formal (aka
> > > computational) and semantic (aka conceptual) aspects of that
> > > language are a "dual aspect all the way down".
> >
> > If I understand this right, he's arguing for something going on in brains 
> > that has a one-to-one relationship with the referents outside of brains and 
> > he is further saying that the languages we speak and think in and the 
> > meanings our thoughts embody are the flip side(?) of the causal events in 
> > brains, i.e., that there's a precise parallel of brain event with every 
> > meaning, every thought we think linguistically without which our thoughts 
> > would lack meaning
> (content)?


> Oh, ... if I put in Fodor's own words, it would give us both headaches, and 
> I'm not sure I quite understand yours, either.  Of course his books are there 
> for your perusal, if you like.  But I
> warn you, even as Fodor concedes in his most recent, he is very
> easy to misread.
>


I have the same experience reading Fodor. He's very esoteric. On the other hand 
I find Dennett pretty easy to grasp and Searle, though he's kind of fuzzy on 
his terms, is also not all that difficult (though he is hard to pin down 
because of what I take to be his tendencies to lapse into confusions given his 
commitment to first and third person ontologies on the one hand vs. causal 
explanations on the other).

I noted when reading Edelman that he was very, very complex and convoluted and 
I thought that a serious flaw in his thinking because, when you can't express 
something in a fairly straightforward way, it suggests you really haven't 
gotten clear on it yourself.

I thought Hawkins pretty challenging, too, but in the end (probably thanks to 
his co-author, Blakelee) his ideas were clear if complex and a bit on the 
abstruse side at their deepest level.

But Fodor just gets my head spinning. I wonder if he is more like Edelman here 
than Hawkins?


> Certainly he's a physicalist in that physical brain state
> corresponds with meaning, but just what that means (!) is not
> necessarily clear, in regards to balancing "methodological solipsism" and 
> correspondence with distal objects.
>

Yes, not at all clear. The mental language is presumably some corresponding set 
of processes that underlie each and every distinct thought we have and which 
somehow get translated into the language(s) we actually speak to one another 
and think in. What kind of "language" must such a mental language be? How do we 
discover it, recognize it when we see it, distinguish it from other brain 
processes, etc.?

I'm skeptical of this approach.


> > How does this Fodorian view (if I've got it right) sit with the account I 
> > gave earlier of meaning as connection in a complex web of conserved 
> > connections?
>
> I'm not sure if I read your message.  Fodor's term of choice is
> "modularity", which he corresponds roughly to the idea that you
> must have symbolic and semantic genericity a la Chomsky.
>


I was curious if his account is necessarily contrary to what I have laid out as 
an explanation of how we get meaning. After all, I am also in accord that the 
brain runs processes and that these processes are what underlie and constitute 
the features we recognize as consciousness in ourselves. But I would not call 
such processes a "language" in any but a metaphorical sense (though note that 
Ramachandran does, indeed, refer to such processes as a language though he 
seems to mean by this just the system of informational transfer within the 
brain -- is Fodor's proposal no more than Ramachandran's likening of internal 
brain signaling, from neuron to neuron and neural group to neural group, to the 
language of the brain then?).


> It's Fodor's mention of semantics that is easiest to misread,
> and that happens to be about 50% of his theory.  I've been reading
> his stuff for over thirty years, and I am still untangling the
> threads.
>
> Josh
> =========================================

I tried him a few times and always came away without any clear picture of his 
thesis. Even his Robot Reply to Searle left me rather cold. Still I have the 
sense there is something there, something found in his insistence on the 
primacy of causal relations in giving an account of meaning and semantics. But 
his ideas just seem to me to lack clarity, to lack focus.

SWM

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