The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures) [Paperback]

Jerry A. Fodor (Author)

Book Description

Series: Jean Nicod Lectures | Publication Date: August 28, 1995

Bound to be widely read and much discussed, The Elm and the Expert, written in Jerry Fodor's usual highly readable, irreverent style, provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. The book extends and revises a view of the relation between mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book The Language of Thought.There is a general consensus among philosophers that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. Fodor has himself espoused this view in previous publications, and it is widespread (if tacit) throughout the cognitive science community. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus. Fodor concludes that these considerations are far less decisive than has been supposed. He offers a theory sketch in which psychological explanation is intentional, psychological processes are computational, and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential. Connections with the problem of "naturalizing" intentionality are also explored.The four lectures in The Elm and the Expert were originally delivered in Paris in the spring of 1993 to inaugurate the Jean Nicod Lecture series. The Jean Nicod Lectures are delivered annually by a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The 1993 lectures marked the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1931). The lectures are sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as part of its effort to develop the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science in France.Jean Nicod series

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Written in a highly readable, irreverent style, The Elm and the Expert provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference.

Product Details

• Paperback: 143 pages
• Publisher: A Bradford Book (August 28, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262560933
• ISBN-13: 978-0262560931
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,054,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's great if you're into that kind of thing..., June 30, 2004

By 

J. Wisdom - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures) (Paperback)

Fodor's task in EAE is to try and harmonize the following three beliefs: (1) Psychological laws exist and they necessarily include reference to entities like beliefs, desires, and the like; (2) The semantic content of such entities is determined by the causal relations that exist between intentional states and whatever object in the external world reliably causes them; and (3) Mental processes are computational processes; i.e., our minds are just very complicated symbol manipulators. The problem that arises for whoever holds all three of these views is that, apparently, (3) requires that intentional states be fixed by their *internal* relations, and (2) requires that intentional states (or at least their content anyway) be individuated by *external* relations. Oops. So, Fodor tries to find a way in which mental content can be externally fixed and reliably computationally implemented.

He claims that the coinstantiation of broad content with its computational implementers is both reliable and explicable, but metaphysically contingent. The book is divided into four lectures. In the first lecture, Fodor outlines the above problem and his proposal. In the second lecture, Fodor argues that it is plausible to believe that a mechanism exists which keeps broad mental content stuck to its computational implementers. He further claims that one who holds a broad view of content ought to treat Putnam and Frege cases as accidents. In fact, he claims that both broad and narrow views of content must maintain that Frege cases, though common, are unsystematic and exceptional in terms of how people normally behave. Put differently, both internalist and externalist views of content must allow that people tend to recognize the relevant identities in cases that are relevant to their behavior (e.g., Smith wants to go to Chicago, Chicago is where air tedium flies to...).

Fodor devotes the third lecture to treating cases in which it is not true that concepts that carry the same information are always coextensive. Most specifically, he deals with Quine's question of why "rabbit: means "rabbit" and not "undetached proper parts of a rabbit." In the final lecture, Fodor applies his theory to epistemology Here (and only here) does the reader get a sense of why Fodor is trying to make these theories work. Basically, he thinks that eliminativism is obviously false and a serious dualism is miraculous- but Fodor doesn't believe in miracles. So, a naturalized theory of mental representation is the only way out. (On a side note, he *does* believe that minds are "hopeful monsters"- see chapters 14 and 15 of his "In Critical Condition" and also his chapter in James K. Beilby, ed., "Naturalism Defeated?")

Given my purposes in this review I won't provide arguments against Fodor's view. However, I don't buy (2) and (3) above, and thus don't need to answer the same kinds of problems Fodor does. Overall, the read-worthiness of the book is directly proportional to the degree that one: (a) is a fan of an informational semantics and a computational psychology and wants to see how they *might* be harmonized, (b) disagrees with either or both of these views but wants to see a rigorous argument for an opposing view, and (c) is generally interested in the relationship between mind and language, and has a high degree of aptitude (or at least ambition) for reading analytic philosophy. Also, depending on one's interests, different readers will derive differing degrees of benefit from any given chapter. Personally, I am very interested in the material covered in chapters one, three, and four but couldn't give a rip about the material in the third chapter.

As for the presentation itself, I thought Fodor could have done a better job of explaining the dilemma for (2) and (3) above. I'm pretty new to this particular area of the philosophy of mind, and it took me about four read-throughs and some close outlining before I really began to get what Fodor was saying. Maybe I'm not as sharp as most who will read this book, but either way, the subject material is difficult enough. Being as pedantic as possible might've helped here.

At any rate, The Elm and the Expert is a high-quality, high-level work in analytic philosophy of mind and language. It definitely isn't for everybody-not even for most philosophers, I think-but it should prove illuminating for those willing and able to give it a careful reading.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars For my next trick, I'll get it wrong, May 26, 2008

By 

Randall McCutcheon (Bexley, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures) (Paperback)

This book demonstrates that some philosophers who get it right, do so by chance. Before this book, Fodor had been getting it right about intentional laws; in this book, he discovers that the grass is always greener on the wrong (even "previously ridiculed to great effect") side of the fence. As usual, the exposition is wildly entertaining.

Basically, Fodor rejects the lessons that thought experiments had taught him in excellent books like "Psychosemantics". Twins and Frege cases, stuff like that. He rejects them here on the grounds that these thought experiments involve unrealistic (more precisely, "unsystematic") scenarios. That's a really odd conclusion--I almost liken it to a physicist who rejects what his cyclotron has taught him, saying "situations like that don't happen anyway", concluding "physics is Newtonian after all." Only almost, since the ways in which physics deviates from the Newtonian is clearly systematic, whereas that's up for grabs here.

Fodor still acknowledges, I think, that the thought experiments favor narrow content. For example: say Tyler and twin Tyler are abducted in their sleep by space aliens. They wake up, just the two of them, aboard a spaceship. They mill about, exchange seats many times, explore the universe together and figure out that in fact they are from different although locally indistinguishable planets on opposite sides of the galaxy. Well, almost indistinguishable; the one difference is the way "arthritis" is used. In one of their worlds, it is restricted to rheumatoid ailments of joints, while in the other it is used more generally. Now as it happens, both Tyler and twin Tyler affirm "No one has every had arthritis in their thigh." As both Tyler and twin Tyler favor a broad perspective, they are committed to the fact that their thoughts have different contents. Indeed, they are committed to the fact that one of them is right and one of them is wrong. However, there is no way for either of them to know which. As a matter of fact, it isn't even clear that there is a fact of the matter which (since it may not be the case that all possible pasts send twin Tyler, or I guess in this case we should just say, "the Tyler sitting over there on the left" back to twin Earth). Just, that one of them is, and one of them isn't.

Can that be right? Surely not, I would say, and it shows that content (our everyday concept, I mean) is, strictly speaking, rather narrow. What I mean, is, our intuitions tell us this about the concept we use all the time. Surely there is such a thing as "broad content"; it's just not what we mean when we say "content" pretheoretically. That's what philosophers do; they create these thought experiments to delineate the contours of their (our) concepts.

However in this book, as Fodor (shrewdly?) points out, "there aren't twins, so who cares?" In other words, we never have to figure out what the borders of our concepts are, because the universe plays safely inside of those borders, virtually all of the time. So, while not rejecting the conclusion of the thought experiment, he rejects the thought experiment itself.

Well, that's all well and good, and it's unlikely to much impair your ability to capture regularities (i.e. "do science", as opposed to "do philosophy") to use what is, strictly speaking, the wrong concept. But, it sets a very dangerous precedent. Like for example the distinction between causes and correlations becomes empirical, too. (Maybe in some universes, the cases where they come apart aren't "systematic".) If that isn't interesting enough for you, I can go back and show that "Godel" means "the prover of the incompleteness theorem" after all...I mean, that whole Schmidt story was just an exception, not a counterexample, and my theory of meaning can tolerate exceptions, so long as they aren't systematic, right? Whatever that means. (Incidentally I don't mean to suggest that the meaning of "Godel" isn't captured by a description. It surely is...just not a finitely supported cylinder set sort of description relative to our other concepts. It's a fractalized description, and that's the whole mess that Kripke didn't get (Frank Jackson did, and probably others). This is another story, though.) Hell, everything is empirical. In fact, I think what Fodor's done in this book is just to've put philosophers out of business wholesale.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.