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

  • From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:56:45 -0000

--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "SWM" <SWMirsky@...> wrote:
>
> > If the world is complex, how could philosophy of the world be
> > simple?
> >
> > And, the world *is* complex.
>
> I meant straight forward as opposed to merely simple but I agree that it 
> isn't always possible to state ideas in the simplest of terms.

Look at the Mandelbrot pattern.  You state it simply, yet the result
is infinitely complex.  The statement gives you none of the details.


> Edelman and Hawkins

I just don't care.

I consider all such work pathologically wrong, naive, ill-informed, atavistic.  
See Bennett and Hacker for substantial (but not all) details of the problem, 
just don't read them for the solution!


> Whether Fodor is doing that is something I haven't determined to my own 
> satisfaction yet.

Read:
* The Language of Thought (1975)
* RePresentations (1980)
and
* LOT 2 (2008)

(you can skip his other eleven or so books)

Then - you still won't know, but in much more detail!


> >  ... This is "the systems reply" writ large.
>
> Here we are in agreement though I would have (and have) expressed it 
> differently.

The devil is in the details, of which I'm afraid there are many.

As Fodor says, and I agree, the only way to do this stuff is extremely 
multidisciplinary.  And us naked apes aren't very good at stuff that has whole 
lots of free variables.  It's a problem.


> This is what I was hoping for: A "computer language" of brains then? Of 
> course the language of programming isn't the language of the computer for it 
> must become machine language first for computers do actually implement, 
> right? So is Fodor's language of thought the machine language while English 
> is like COBOL say?

Yeeeah, to a first approximation, sort of.

As a matter of fact, Fodor even makes a bogus reference to compilers, somewhere 
or other, he mistakes the compilation process for the execution process.

You have in my "systems reply writ large" the computer hardware, a program, and 
the execution process/trace.  I take it this three+ component set is a 
cannonical form, and effectively irreducible.

Compilation, from Cobol to assembler, is basically free.  Fodor doesn't worry 
much about English as such, what he worries about are behaviors and situations 
and how the semantics have to work, in Cobol or assembler or LOT or English, 
the logical issues.


> >  That *some* physical form is eventually found to correspond, is important, 
> > but that's not Fodor's department.  But, just to cause us all pain, Fodor 
> > insists that this computer language works only because and when it 
> > corresponds in some dual-aspect manner also to innate and preexisting 
> > concepts, that represent (eg, mirror) the world.
>
> This gives me some further trouble (as you suspected it would). But it does 
> sound like he's saying something like Sean is getting at with his "brain 
> scripts".

Yes, but Fodor is all about LOT, and Sean, good Wittgensteinian, is not!  Now, 
this is a problem, but not irremediable.  Scripts without language?  Or, what 
language is legal, for writing scripts?  And aren't scripts, rules of sort?  I 
think there are solutions to all of these, but they are going to move away from 
W-classic.

But really, no, Fodor doesn't go for the script idea as such, Fodor does 
concepts and modules and genericity.  I'd add scripts to that list, actually, 
so I have some sporting interest in seeing where Sean gets with his things.


> > Now, clearly, if you HAVE something that represents and mirrors the world, 
> > that would be handy.
>
> How does he think this happens? Presumably the idea of "representing" and 
> "mirroring" is not intended as we might use the terms for the conscious 
> aspect of our minds (i.e., that we are aware of representing and mirroring 
> when we are doing these things). Presumably he thinks there is a tacit, 
> non-conscious one-to-one relation between world object and thought object in 
> the language of thought then?

Basically, yes.

And hardly anybody likes that, but his argument is that his system is only 
clarifying what everybody typically does with "propositional attitudes", and so 
it's very tricky (for fans of propositional attitudes, who are many) to attack 
him effectively.


Josh


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