Hi Walter: For Fodor, how do we arrive at concepts? And what exactly does it mean to think about a DOG as such? For example, suppose I ask Fodor to think about a dieseldown. What does he do when thinking about a dieseldown as such? Descartes believed in innate ideas. Indeed, those things learned by acquaintance and learned by description through experience were deemed quite inferior indeed to such innate concepts such as God, and goodness, and clarity. If Fodor does not himself resort to innateness in order to explain at least some concept acquisition, then what exactly is the source of the concepts we contemplate as such? Does Fodor not come back to some sort of epistemic basis for the concept acquisition? I would hesitate before ascribing this kind of concept possession to Hume, though. Certainly, Locke does not buy it for a second. I like the cheekiness of the article, and I wish I could have been at the Smart lecture back then. Prof. Fodor must be quite an entertaining lecturer. The most entertaining lecturers at Berkeley that I remember were Searle and Scriven. Their classes were always packed, but I never knew of anyone getting an 'A' in one of Scriven's classes. There, the intellectual thrills came at a steep price to your GPA. Ha! Thanks! --Ron --- On Thu, 8/19/10, walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx> wrote: From: walto <calhorn@xxxxxxx> Subject: [quickphilosophy] Fodor on Concepts I: The set-up To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: Thursday, August 19, 2010, 7:17 AM According to Jerry Fodor, the characteristic philosophical doctrine of the 20th Century—and, in his view, the biggest mistake to be found there—is that concept possession, e.g., understanding the concept of PARTRIDGE, is a dispositional/epistemic condition. That is, to have that or any other concept is a matter of knowing how to use some word(s) or acting a certain way upon confronting some sort of object (in this case a particular kind of bird), or some combination of like epistemic and/or dispositional characteristics. This doctrine is a big deal, Fodor says, because as thoughts "are made of concepts" instead of being event-like, the possition makes not just concepts but thoughts themselves to be dispositional. That is, one must take the causal powers of mental states to be more along the analogy of fragility causing a window to break than along the analagy of the wreckage being the affect of the window's being struck by a baseball. He also thinks that since epistemic states are inherently normative (knowing being a matter of getting something right) this doctrine makes concept possession normative too. Thus, understanding PARTRIDGE might be taken to require distinguishing partridges from quails correctly. Fodor calls this general error of the century "concept pragmatism" and he lays it and the doorsteps of both "crude behaviorists" (e.g., Quine and Skinner) and their more "sophisticated" brethren (like Ryle, Wittgenstein, and Davidson). What Fodor takes to distinguish these two mistaken schools is that the crude group believes that the know-how required by concept possession can be specified in a purely behavioral way, rather than needing a partly intentional vocabulary. Fodor looks back longingly on what he calls the Cartesian take on concept possession. Cartesians (including, he says, Hume) had a non-epistemic view of the matter. On their view (and Fodor's too) understanding the concept PARTRIDGE is an intentional state, not requiring any particular knowledge (either how or that), but only an ability to think in a particular way. E.g., to have the concept PARTRIDGE is nothing more or less than to be able to think about partridges as such, and vice versa. And as thinking about some partridge as such is an event rather than a disposition, we get back to the primacy of mental events instead of dispositional "states" (like fragility). And this is good, he thinks, because dispositions are, on his view, really parasitical on events of particular types. So, for example, Swan's famous obsession with Odette consisted in his inability to stop having particular recurring mental events that were examples of thinking about her. Further, there is nothing particularly normative about concept possession for the Cartesian: it doesn't require that anybody be able to perform this or that action correctly. The crowning conclusion of Fodor's discussion of the pitfalls he believes to have been produced by the mistaken view is an argument (but not a very good one, I don't think) which he believes shows that concept pragmatists are doomed to some sort of epistemological idealism. The argument is this: 1. Concept pragmatism makes concept possession an intrinsically epistemic condition. 2. If concept possession is intrinsically epistemic, then mental states are intrinsically subject to epistemic evaluation. 3. Whatever is intrinsically subject to epistemic evaluation implies the possibility of an evaluator and may thus be said to be interpretation-dependent. 4. To be interpretation-dependent is akin to being mind-dependent. 5. Therefore, the facts of psychology, unlike, say, the facts of geology are mind-dependent. For what it's worth, not only is there quite a bit of hand-waving going on here, but nobody—whatever their view of the nature of concept possession—would (or should) deny that the facts of psychology are mind-dependent in some way that the facts of geology are not in the first place. (There is another little section, one that I've skipped, that seems to me to have similar flaws: it's about Quine and Wittgenstein on the social/interpersonal nature of concepts.) Fortunately, these arguments are not terribly important to Fodor's main goal, which isn't so much to prove that concept pragmatism is dastardly, but that it's dead wrong. In the next installment, I'll outline his case for that claim. W