This book describes how understanding the structure of reality leads to the Theory of Everything Equation. The equation unifies the forces of nature and enables the merging of relativity with quantum theory. The book explains the big bang theory and everything else.

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have recently criticized Davidson's methodology of radical interpretation because of its apparent failure to reflect how actual interpretation is achieved. Responding to such complaints, Davidson claims that he is not interested in the empirical issues surrounding actual interpretation but instead focuses on the question of what conditions make interpretation possible. It is argued that this exchange between Fodor and Lepore on one side, and Davidson on the other, cannot be viewed simply (...) as a naturalist reaction to non-naturalist philosophical inquiry. Through a careful excavation of the hidden assumptions and commitments underlying this debate, we recognize a more serious disagreement over the intellectual obligations of naturalism; a position with a firm hold on current philosophical imaginations. In the process, we gain a new appreciation for how such commitments shape these naturalist positions, and recognize that any resolution to this specific debate will require careful attention to the divergent commitments that are its real source. (shrink)

Hartry Field, Jerry Fodor and others differ with Donald Davidson over the question of how a theory of content should be structured. Field and Fodor maintain that a theory should begin by following the compositional structure of a sentence in reducing the semantic properties of complex expressions to the semantic properties of their simplest parts and complete the job by reducing the semantic properties of the parts to non-semantic ones. Davidson describes this approach as the ‘Building-Block method’ (...) and maintains that it cannot possibly succeed. He holds that a theory of content should ‘give up reference’ by treating the semantic properties of basic expressions as a purely technical devices with no direct relation to non-semantic phenomenon. In this essay, I examine what I call “Davidson’s Dilemma”, the conflict between the apparent soundness the arguments for the view that a theory must treat reference as a point where linguistic and non-linguistic reality meet and the equally apparent soundness his argument that reference cannot possibly play this role. I propose a resolution to the dilemma that grants the validity of Davidson’s arguments against the building-block theories but is, I believe, more palatable to mainstream semanticists than Davidson’s solution. This solution, which I call ‘content partialism’ treats the reference of terms as regularities across propositional contents. I show how content partialism is consistent with a Kripkean theory of reference fixing, the touchstone of those who advocate building-block theories. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and KuhnDavid GormanThe American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, by Giovanna Borradori; translated by Rosanna Crocitto; xii & 177pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, $32.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.The idea for this book, first published in Italian in 1991, was good—to assemble a collection of (...) interviews with the key figures in American philosophy. And the list of philosophers whom Giovanna Borradori chose as representing the best in contemporary American thought was very good—as becomes especially clear when in her introduction she mentions the ones who, for whatever reason, got away: Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Nelson Goodman, Saul Kripke, John Rawls, and John Searle (p. 5). Add these names to those of the philosophers whom she was able to interview for this volume, and you have an impressively complete roster of the thinkers who have made the postwar era in the United States arguably one of the great periods of philosophy.Unfortunately, the execution of the book does not fulfill the promise of its conception. And perhaps nothing could have; the fact remains, however, that Borradori proves herself singularly ill-equipped, in terms both of background knowledge and of intellectual orientation, to bring out very much of importance in these important philosophers’ ideas, either in the interviews that she conducts with them or in the prefatory material that she supplies to bind the collection together.The essence of Borradori’s problem is that she approaches these professional academic philosophers with the incongruous assumption that they are [End Page 388] people with interesting general ideas about history, society, art, religion, or whatever—she assumes in short that these professors are intellectuals. But that is scarcely a term that describes your typical American philosopher. Nor do I mean this condescendingly: on the contrary, just what is significant and valuable about contemporary philosophers in the analytic mold (as almost all of Borradori’s interviewees are) is the narrowness of their focus on problems and methods of logic and the natural sciences, the two Archimedean levers by which analytic philosophy has come far closer than anyone could have predicted to moving the conceptual universe decisively.Of course, not everyone views matters this way, and Richard Rorty in particular has made a spectacular career out of disputing this image—largely a self-congratulatory one, as he takes it—of the analytic tradition. Whether his dissent is justified or not, his role in the collection constitutes another of its problems, because he is not just one of the group of thinkers whom Borradori is interviewing: beyond this, it is Rorty’s ideas which supply Borradori with an intellectual program (in default of one of her own), which necessarily distorts her presentation of the other philosophers’ thoughts, and her line of questioning in these interviews. So, for example, all the interviewees are subjected to questions about American Pragmatism generally and John Dewey in particular, not because these things are of any inherent significance to most of them (as several of them point out, politely), but because Rorty thinks that they should be, and because Borradori follows his line unquestioningly. Thus most of the conversations recorded here are at cross-purposes to start with.Borradori provides brief introductions for each interview, betraying little familiarity with the work of the philosophers, particularly when the work involved is at all technical, or more than about ten years old. Except to summarize these summaries her general introduction for the volume does no more than to indulge in the kind of military and cartographic metaphors made tiresomely familiar by such recent European thinkers as Foucault. Little seems to have been lost in the retranslation of this volume from the Italian, except that the historian of science George Sarton has somehow become “Georges Sardon” (p. 31).David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Jerry Fodor is one of the most important philosophers of mind in recent decades. He has done much to set the agenda in this field and has had a significant influence on the development of cognitive science. Fodor's project is that of constructing a physicalist vindication of folk psychology and so paving the way for the development of a scientifically respectable intentional psychology. The centrepiece of his engagement in this project is a theory of the cognitive mind, namely, the (...) computational theory of mind, which postulates the existence of a language of thought. Fodor: Language, Mind and Philosophy is a comprehensive study of Fodor's writings. Individual chapters are devoted to each of the major issues raised by his work and contain extensive discussion of his relationships to key developments in cognitive science and to the views of such philosophical luminaries as Dennett, Davidson and Searle. (shrink)

The hazards of the use of English as a default language in analytic philosophy are obvious to everyone except mainstream analytical philosophers. The uncanny conceptual resemblance between what one is told about Jerry Fodor’s universal Language of Thought and current globalese basic academic English calls for reflection. [...] What I am pleading for is not just a matter of paying great attention to other philosophical traditions. It is a matter of understanding how English cannot serve as any centre or (...) point de départ for the description of all cognitive systems. We need to try to define the topology of the human cognitive space where English must show up as the very untypical case of a natural language that it manifestly is. Pace Donald Davidson, English is not the measure of all things. And historical cognitive ethnography is relevant to philosophical epistemology. The indispensable basis for any philosophy with global ambitions is a conceptual “experimental method” applied to the problems of conceptual diversity among human languages regarding not least of all the conceptual schemes of which one’s own philosophical keywords are an integral part. (shrink)

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

Intentional, ‘commonsense,’ or ‘folk’ psychology is, as Jerry Fodor has remarked, ubiquitous. Explanations of what we say and do in terms of our reasons for acting are the stock in trade of intentional psychology. But there is a question whether explanations in terms of reasons are properly explanatory. Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett, to name two, have defended intentional psychology and its reason‐explanations. Still, many philosophers – including Fodor, Davidson and Dennett – fail to pay due attention (...) to the narrative basis of such agent‐centered accounts of action. In this paper, I argue that psychological explanation is an agent‐centered, narrative‐based interpretive practice. To make my case, I present a poetics of psychological explanation: seven elements which collectively describe what makes psychological explanations work. Narrative form allows us to represent the temporal arc of agents’ actions – as well as the temporal arc of their reasoning about their actions, both prospective and retrospective. It allows us to negotiate between the canonical and the exceptional in human experience, and thus to account for actions that strike us as puzzling or unusual – whether the puzzle originates in our suboptimal understanding or the agent's suboptimal reasoning. And it allows us to juxtapose different perspectives on any action. Such juxtapositioning gives us a mechanism for coming to see how an action that strikes us as misguided might have been construed by the agent as reasonable given her understanding of her circumstances. After establishing the seven elements of the poetics, I address the objection that narrative‐based accounts of intentional action are not properly explanatory. (shrink)

PREFACE PART I METAPHYSICS Review of John McDowell’s Mind and World Special Sciences: Still Autonomous after All These Years Conclusion Acknowledgment Notes PART II CONCEPTS Review of Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts Notes There Are No Recognitional Concepts--Not Even RED Introduction Compositionality Why Premise P is Plausible Objections Conclusion Afterword Acknowledgment Notes There Are No Recognitional Concepts--Not Even RED, Part 2: The Plot Thickens Introduction: The Story ’til Now Compositonality and Learnability Notes Do We Think in Mentalese? Remarks on (...) Some Arguments of Peter Carruthers Appendix: Higher-Order Thoughts Notes Review of A. W. Moore’s Points of View PART III COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE Review of Paul Churchland’s The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity: Why Smolensky’s Solution Doesn’t Work Introduction I The Systematicity Problem and Its Classical Solution II Weak Compositionality III Strong Compositional Structure Conclusion Notes Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity : Why Smolensky’s Solution Still Doesn’t Work Stage 1: Classical Theories The Connection with The Connection with Stage 2: Smolenksy Architectures Stage 3: Why Smolensky’s Solution Still Doesn’t Work Digression on singing and sailing Acknowledgment Notes There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith’s Beyond Modularity 1. Encapsulation 2. Inaccessibility 3. Domain specificity 4. Innateness Conclusion Notes Review of Jeff Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness Brainlikeness Interactions Representational Nativism Empiricism Review of Steven Mithen’s The Prehistory of the Mind PART IV PHILOSOPHICAL DARWINISM Review of Richard Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable Deconstructing Dennett’s Darwin Introduction Adaptation Adaptation and Teleology Deconstruction Notes Is Science Biologically Possible? Comments on Some Arguments of Patricia Churchland and of Alvin Plantinga Acknowledgment Notes Review of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and Henry Plotkin’s Evolution in Mind Computation Massive modularity Innateness Psychological Darwinism. (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

Wisely, the authors begin this book by describing it as a polemic. They argue that most contemporary analytic metaphysics is a waste of time and resources since contemporary ‘neo-scholastic’ metaphysical theorizing cannot hope to attain objective truth given its penchant for making a priori claims about the nature of the world which are backed up by appeal to intuition. In engaging in this activity, metaphysicians have, the authors claim, abandoned hope of locating any interesting connection between their metaphysical pronouncements and (...) how our best empirical theories describe the world. Moreover, the success attained by empirical science just cannot be matched by metaphysical theorizing and so, faced with this asymmetry, empirical science wins: a priori metaphysical theorizing must give way to a naturalistic form of metaphysics, a positive account of which the authors attempt to elucidate in the second and third, rather lengthy chapters of the book.The first chapter consists of a statement of the authors’ negative view, a vigorous, sustained and sometimes withering attack upon contemporary a priori metaphysics. Most ire is reserved for those who indulge in what the authors call ‘pseudo-scientific metaphysics’; that is, those who pay lip service to keeping their metaphysical speculation in tune with physics, only to constrain their ontology in such a way that the entities and processes within it do not even play a role in current physical theory, or are in straightforward contradiction with it. Much philosophy of science and scientific metaphysics is too superficial and simplistic to deserve the name and bears more relation to ‘the philosophy of “A” Level chemistry’. The guilty in this respect include David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim, Jonathan Lowe, Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, Crawford Elder, Trenton Merricks among …. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Jerry A. Fodor’s critique of the logical structures proposed in Donald Davidson’s “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.” I will have nothing to say below about the parts of Fodor’s paper which deal with the proposals of Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning.” I am inclined to agree with Fodor’s conclusion that, a truth definition for a natural language need not reveal the logical structure of the sentences of the language, though my reasons are (...) quite different from those which Fodor gives. Fodor mentions only the fact that trivial truth definitions are possible; however, even disregarding trivial definitions, I would maintain that a wide range of putative ‘logical forms’ can be consistent with the same assignment of truth values and that the choice among alternative systems of ‘logical form’ must be made on the basis of whether they allow rules of inference and rules of grammar to be stated in full generality. (shrink)

Whenever psychologists, neuroscientists, or philosophers draw conclusions about moral judgments in general from a small selected sample, they assume that moral judgments are unified by some common and peculiar feature that enables generalizations and makes morality worthy of study as a unified field. We assess this assumption by considering the six main candidates for a unifying feature: content, phenomenology, force, form, function, and brain mechanisms. We conclude that moral judgment is not unified on any of these levels and that moral (...) science should adopt a more fine-grained taxonomic approach that studies carefully defined groups of moral judgments. (shrink)

This dissertation is concerned with theories of mental content, and in particular with the relationships between a theory of content and truth and rationality. My strategy is to examine the metaphysics of various approaches to content and ask certain questions. What is it for a belief to be true on a particular theory? What is it for a thought process to be rational? Are truth and rationality useful explanatory properties on each theory? Are they useful normative or action-guiding properties? Does (...) a theory allow truth and rationality to be valuable? ;I argue that there is a useful categorization of theories of mental content in terms of the kinds of connection they make between content and truth and rationality. Some theories, most notably Donald Davidson's and other theories inspired by his work, make it a constitutive truth, and thus necessary, that any entity that has intentional states must believe mostly truths and be largely rational. This holistic theories can be contrasted with other atomistic approaches, including those championed by Jerry Fodor and others, that deny such necessary connections, and leave the question of just how much truth and falsehood can be believed, and how rational or irrational a believer can be, to be settled by empirical investigation. ;The various chapters of this dissertation examine these different types of theories, and also the teleological theory of Ruth Millikan. I argue that atomistic theories of content have certain undesirable consequences: truth and rationality will no longer be explanatorily or normatively useful properties. On the other hand, holistic theories of content that make truth and rationality necessary features of systems with intentional states face different problems, because the norms they claim are constitutive of content are unlikely to be true of evolved creatures. Teleological theories, which presume a weak, historical connection between content and truth and rationality, fare best against these tests--they make truth and rationality important parts of explanations, and provide some motivation for pursuing them. (shrink)

My dissertation concerns the question of how our desires and beliefs explain our bodily movements. This study aims to show that the solutions given to this question by both token physicalists, including Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, and Fred Dretske, and a proponent of a commonsense approach, Lynne Rudder Baker, are unsatisfactory. Finally, I discuss Daniel Dennett and argue that his theory is the only choice we have. ;All of the five philosophers claim that reasons cause actions. Davidson's (...) theory fails to answer the question at issue because, on his account, the intentional properties of reasons are causally inefficacious in producing bodily behavior. Although Dretske's and Fodor's theories do not have this problem, their accounts receive the challenge from externalists, who argue that our intentional properties are determined not only by intrinsic physicial properties, but also by our relation to the environment. Since our intrinsic physical properties determines our bodily behavior, intentional properties seem irrelevant to the production of bodily movements. In response to externalism, both Dretske and Fodor attempt to provide an account of intentionality. However, I argue that their accounts are unsatisfactory. A fortiori, they fail to show content has any explanatory role. ;Then I switch to Baker's commonsense approach. She rejects the Standard View of the physicalists, i.e., that to have a propositional attitude is to have a brain state that has propositional content, and endorses her 'Practical Realism.' I, however, contend that her rejection of the Standard View is not successful and that Practical Realism, being compatible with the Standard View, fails to provide any new insight into intentional explanation. So the question at issue is still unanswered. ;At the end, I discuss Dennett's theory, which also rejects the Standard View. According to Dennett, there is no ontological difference between our beliefs and the beliefs of a machine, a nation, and evolution, provided that their behavior can be interpreted from the intentional stance. Therefore, instead of providing an account of the intentional , Dennett attempts to dissolve our urge for such an account by "demystifying" our intentionality. (shrink)

1 There is a Standard Objection to the idea that concepts might be prototypes (or exemplars, or stereotypes): Because they are productive, concepts must be compositional. Prototypes aren't compositional, so concepts can't be prototypes (see, e.g., Margolis, 1994).2 However, two recent papers (Osherson and Smith, 1988; Kamp and Partee, 1995) reconsider this consensus. They suggest that, although the Standard Objection is probably right in the long run, the cases where prototypes fail to exhibit compositionality are relatively exotic and involve phenomena (...) which any account of compositionality is likely to find hard to deal with; for example, the effects of quantifiers, indexicals, contextual constraints, etc. KP are even prepared to indulge a guarded optimism: "... when a suitably rich compositional theory... is developed, prototypes will be seen ... as one property among many which only when taken altogether can support a compositional theory of combination" (p.56). In this paper, we argue that the Standard Objection to prototype theory was right after all: The problems about compositionality are insuperable in even the most trivial sorts of examples; it is therefore as near to certain as anything in cognitive science ever gets that the structure of concepts is not statistical. Theories of categorization, concept acquisition, lexical meaning and the like, which assume the contrary simply don't work. We commence with a general discussion of the constraints that an account of concepts must meet if their compositionality is to explain their productivity. We'll then turn to a criticism of proposals that OS2 and KP make for coping with some specific cases. (shrink)

This thesis has three parts. In the first part, the author defends the coherence of Cartesian scepticism about the external world. In particular, the author contends that such scepticism survives attacks from Descartes himself, as well as from W.V.O. Quine, Robert Nozick, Alvin Goldman, and David Armstrong. It follows that Cartesian scepticism remains intact. In the second part of this thesis, the author contends that the semantic or content externalisms of Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge do not refute Cartesian scepticism (...) about the external world. In particular, he argues that Putnam and Burge do not make good their respective externalist cases against scepticism, and that they beg the question against that position. The author concludes that semantic or content externalism is important against such scepticism. In the third part of this thesis, the author addresses the mind, and suggests that Descartes, by offering his cogito argument, also offers a theory of thought content, which he then supports with his substance dualism. He suggests that Descartes does not succeed with any of his arguments here, although his theory of thought content is still plausible. To remedy this, the author discusses the versions of narrow meaning or content offered by Jerry Fodor and Colin McGinn, and defends a version of such meaning or content that presupposes that semantic or content externalism is false. The author lastly follows Donald Davidson, and argues for a version anomalous monism, which he contends is a theory that shows how semantic or content internalism might be true. (shrink)

The class of geometric surgical theories is examined. The main theorem is that every stable theory that is interpretable in a geometric surgical theory is superstable of finite U-rank.

Semantic Engines: An Introduction to Mind Design, John C. Haugeland; Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search, Alan Newell and Herbert A. Simon; Complexity and the Study of Artificial and Human Intelligence, Zenon Pylyshyn; A Framework for Representing Knowledge, Marvin Minsky; Artificial Intelligence---A Personal View, David Marr; Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity, Drew McDermott; From Micro-Worlds to Knowledge Representation: AI at an Impasse, Hubert L. Dreyfus; Reductionism and the Nature of Psychology, Hilary Putnam; Intentional Systems, Daniel C. Dennett; The (...) Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism, John C. Haugeland; Minds, Brains, and Programs, John R. Searle; MethodologicalSolipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology, Jerry A. Fodor; The Material Mind, Donald Davidson. (shrink)

A certain metaphysical thesis about meaning that we'll call Informational Role Semantics (IRS) is accepted practically universally in linguistics, philosophy and the cognitive sciences: the meaning (or content, or `sense') of a linguistic expression1 is constituted, at least in part, by at least some of its inferential relations. This idea is hard to state precisely, both because notions like metaphysical constitution are moot and, more importantly, because different versions of IRS take different views on whether there are constituents of meaning (...) other than inferential role, and on which of the inferences an expression occurs in are meaning constitutive. Some of these issues will presently concern us; but for now it will do just to gesture towards such familiar claims as that: it's part and parcel of dog meaning dog2 that the inference from x is a dog to x is an animal is valid; it's part and parcel of boil meaning boil that the inference from x boiled y to y boiled is valid; it's part and parcel of kill meaning kill that the inference from x killed y to y died is valid; and so on. (See Cruse, Ch. 1 and passim.) IRS brings in its train a constellation of ancillary doctrines. Presumably, for example, if an inference is constitutive of the meaning of a word, then learning the word involves learning that the inference holds. If dog means dog because dog ---> animal is valid, then knowing that dog ---> animal is valid is part and parcel of knowing what the word dog means; and, similarly, learning that x boiled y ---> y boiled is part and parcel of learning what boil means, and so forth. IRS constrains grammatical theories. The semantic lexicon of a language is supposed to make explicit whatever one has to know to understand the lexical expressions of the language, so IRS implies that meaning constitutive inferences are part of the semantic lexical entries for items that have them. Lexical entries are thus typically complex objects (`bundles of inferences') according to standard interpretations of IRS.. (shrink)

Abstract In their book, Holism: A Shopper's Guide, Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore fail to distinguish between two kinds of holism. One of these is holism about meaning, which is indeed problematic. The other is holism about translation, which is not so clearly problematic. Moreover, the problem with the first sort is that it renders communication unintelligible, not that it rules out psychological laws. Further, Fodor and Lepore's criticisms of various contemporary holists are based on serious misreadings. In particular, (...) Quine need not accept the conception of statements that they force on him, and Davidson and Dennett do not argue for the principle of charity in the ways Fodor and Lepore suppose. But Fodor and Lepore's question about the provenance of the principle of charity is a good one and deserves an answer. (shrink)