[Wittrs] [quickphilosophy] Re: Fodor on Concepts I: The set-up
- From: "iro3isdx" <xznwrjnk-evca@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:53:16 -0000
--- In quickphilosophy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Ron Allen <wavelets@...> wrote:
> responding to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quickphilosophy/message/139
> Ron:
> For Fodor, how do we arrive at concepts?
Fodor is well known for his nativism, his view that concepts are
innate. He does allow that there are composite concepts that might not
be innate, but he believes we start life with a rich set of innate
concepts. This goes back at least as far as his 1975 book "The
Language of Thought".
> Ron:
> And what exactly does it mean to think about a DOG as such?
I am not sure that Fodor ever attempts to address quite that question.
As best I can tell, he considers thinking to be an internal language
activity, perhaps done in his presumed innate internal language of
thought (or LOT). I think he sometimes refers to LOT as "semantic
markerese" or something like that. In his 1980 "methodological
solipsism" paper, he does say (if I recall), that thought is the use of
logic applied to the formal properties of representations.
Regards,
Neil
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