Daniel Dennett has defended a view along these lines.<sup>5</sup> And the
view just outlined gives voice to a theme of the property dualists
as well. Karl Popper and Joseph Margolis both cite the normative
nature of mental and linguistic ac…Although fair to some functionalists, the preceding is not entirely fair to Fodor. On his view the aim of psychology is to find the best functional characterization of ourselves, and what that is remains an empirical question. As well, his …[^]: An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the University of Ottawa, and to the Brain, Mind, and Person colloquium at SUNY/Oswego. My thanks for the suggestions and criticisms that have informed the present version.
[^1]: See Pau…
Jerry Fodor
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Fodor is a foundational functionalist theorist who argues that mental states should be understood through their functional roles rather than physical properties, a position central to debates about whether psychological concepts can be reduced to or eliminated in favor of neuroscientific descriptions. The course readings engage Fodor's account of psychology as an empirical search for optimal functional characterizations, using his work to probe the tensions between mechanistic explanation and irreducibly mental or linguistic phenomena. His arguments about the ineliminability of mentalistic descriptions help frame the seminar's central question: whether AI and computational systems can capture what makes human cognition and creativity resistant to pure reduction.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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