andreas comments on CogSci books - Less Wrong

5 Post author: xamdam 20 April 2010 02:11PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (40)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: fburnaby 20 April 2010 06:13:18PM *  6 points [-]

Can anyone here recommend reading Fodor? He seems to be very important in the field, but every time I read a short review, he seems to entirely discredit himself, betraying fundamental misunderstandings of the subjects that he criticizes. He's now attacking evolutionary theory in the same way.

Fodor:

The present worry is that the explication of natural selection by appeal to selective breeding is seriously misleading, and that it thoroughly misled Darwin. Because breeders have minds, there’s a fact of the matter about what traits they breed for; if you want to know, just ask them. Natural selection, by contrast, is mindless; it acts without malice aforethought. That strains the analogy between natural selection and breeding, perhaps to the breaking point. What, then, is the intended interpretation when one speaks of natural selection? The question is wide open as of this writing.

I feel obligated give him a chance, given his importance, but he comes off as absolutely ignorant of the things he attempts to criticize. Is there anyone here to disagree and encourage further reading here? Or is he truly as obvious a waste of time as he seems?

Comment author: andreas 21 April 2010 03:34:30AM 0 points [-]

Fodor's arguments for a "language of thought" make sense (see his book of the same name). In a nutshell, thought seems to be productive – out of given concepts, we can always construct new ones, e.g. arbitrary nestings of "the mother of the mother of ..." – systematic – knowing certain concepts automatically leads to the ability to construct other concepts, e.g. knowing the concept "child" and the concept "wild", I can also represent "wild child" – and compositional, e.g. the meaning of "wild child" is a function of the meaning of "wild" and "child".