Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong

Philosophical Review 109 (4):627 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

As the dust jacket proclaims, “this is surely Fodor’s most irritating book in years …. It should exasperate philosophers, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists alike.” Yes, Fodor is an equal-opportunity annoyer. He sees no job for conceptual analysts, no hope for lexical semanticists, and no need for prototype theorists. When it comes to shedding light on concepts, these luminaries have delivered nothing but moonshine. Fodor aims to remedy things, and not just with snake oil. He serves up plenty of clever barbs, potshots, and one-liners, not to mention arguments, to promote his “informational atomism.” It states that there is a large class of concepts, namely lexical concepts, that are ontologically and semantically primitive: each such concept has no internal structure and has its content not in virtue of any relation it bears to other concepts but in virtue of a nomic relation it bears to some property. The property it is thus “locked to” is its content.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong.Jerry A. Fodor - 1998 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
" Concepts: where cognitive science went wrong", de Jerry Fodor.Francisco Cueto Santos - 1999 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):111-115.
The Part of Cognitive Science That Is Philosophy.Daniel C. Dennett - 2009 - Topics in Cognitive Science 1 (2):231--236.
The structure of lexical concepts.Ken Daley - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (3):349 - 372.
Why concepts can't be theories.Jack M. C. Kwong - 2006 - Philosophical Explorations 9 (3):309-325.
Mad dog nativism.Fiona Cowie - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2):227-252.
How not to find the neural correlate of consciousness.Ned Block - 2001 - In João Branquinho (ed.), The Foundations of Cognitive Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 1.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-09-12

Downloads
152 (#115,206)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Kent Bach
San Francisco State University

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references