The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (repost)
The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics (Jean Nicod Lectures) by Jerry A. Fodor
English | August 28, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0262560933 | 143 pages | PDF | 6,4 MB
English | August 28, 1995 | ISBN-10: 0262560933 | 143 pages | PDF | 6,4 MB
Bound to be widely read and much discussed, The Elm and the Expert, written in Jerry Fodor's usual highly readable, irreverent style, provides a lively discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, Twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference.
The book extends and revises a view of the relation between mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book The Language of Thought.There is a general consensus among philosophers that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. Fodor has himself espoused this view in previous publications, and it is widespread (if tacit) throughout the cognitive science community. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus.