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.
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?
I wouldn’t recommend agreeing with him about a lot of things, but he’s definitely worth paying attention to.
The gist of “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way,” from what I can tell so far:
So partly sparked by his own work, modularity became an important idea in cognitive science; not all parts of your mind do the same jobs, or have access to the same information. For example, knowing the Müller-Lyer illusion is an illusion doesn’t ruin the effect.
Some cognitive scientists of an evolutionary bent saw functional modularity, with the functions defined by the adaptive problems they were designed to solve, as the key to predicting and understanding the mind’s entire functional architecture. If the modules are information-encapsulated, then massive modularity also offers a solution to the frame problem. A computational version of this is the picture that Pinker presents in How the Mind Works.
Fodor’s position seems to be something like: there are modules; computation is a good way of thinking about modules; but they seem to be restricted to input (eg. perception) and output (eg. maintaining balance) processes (both in the sense of having clear functional success-criteria and in the sense of being informationally-encapsulated). The things cognitive scientists are most interested in—and have had the least success in studying—seem to be nonmodular; when you “believe a belief” or “think a thought”, you seem to have at least potential access to most of the information you’ve ever had access to before. If belief and thought and other things he calls “global processes” are nonmodular, then computation may not be the right way to think about them, despite being the best hypothesis we’ve had so far.
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”.
Isn’t the obvious answer to his pondering just “Natural selection selects for gene frequency”? And hasn’t that been pretty well known for a while? If so, that’s pretty bad.
And it doesn’t help that everything I’ve read by him so far comes across as disconnected, unmotivated rambling. :-/ I’m gonna have to agree with you.
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:
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?
I wouldn’t recommend agreeing with him about a lot of things, but he’s definitely worth paying attention to.
The gist of “The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way,” from what I can tell so far:
So partly sparked by his own work, modularity became an important idea in cognitive science; not all parts of your mind do the same jobs, or have access to the same information. For example, knowing the Müller-Lyer illusion is an illusion doesn’t ruin the effect.
Some cognitive scientists of an evolutionary bent saw functional modularity, with the functions defined by the adaptive problems they were designed to solve, as the key to predicting and understanding the mind’s entire functional architecture. If the modules are information-encapsulated, then massive modularity also offers a solution to the frame problem. A computational version of this is the picture that Pinker presents in How the Mind Works.
Fodor’s position seems to be something like: there are modules; computation is a good way of thinking about modules; but they seem to be restricted to input (eg. perception) and output (eg. maintaining balance) processes (both in the sense of having clear functional success-criteria and in the sense of being informationally-encapsulated). The things cognitive scientists are most interested in—and have had the least success in studying—seem to be nonmodular; when you “believe a belief” or “think a thought”, you seem to have at least potential access to most of the information you’ve ever had access to before. If belief and thought and other things he calls “global processes” are nonmodular, then computation may not be the right way to think about them, despite being the best hypothesis we’ve had so far.
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”.
Isn’t the obvious answer to his pondering just “Natural selection selects for gene frequency”? And hasn’t that been pretty well known for a while? If so, that’s pretty bad.
And it doesn’t help that everything I’ve read by him so far comes across as disconnected, unmotivated rambling. :-/ I’m gonna have to agree with you.
Gene frequency is true but not terribly informative, or at least I’m more interested in what sort of organisms you end up with.
Selective breeding is for easily identified traits that people can understand. Natural selection produces something more complex and less obvious.