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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
For my next trick, I'll get it wrong, May 26, 2008
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.
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 The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures) 0262560933
Jerry A. Fodor
The MIT Press
The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures)
Books
For my next trick, I'll get it wrong
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.
Randall McCutcheon
May 26, 2008
- Overall: 5
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Location: Bexley, OH
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