Jerry Fodor

And I certainly, as a philosopher, consider work that's been done in connection with this topic valuable.

I mean, more recently, in terms of Anglo-American analytic philosophy of mind, we also have to remember that it was beginning in the 60s and 70s with work by figures like Hillary Putnam and Jerry Fodor.

that AI was invoked in terms of the issue of, well, if it's possible for us to design a thinking computer, an intelligent machine, this indicates that human cognition is multiply realizable and is not exclusive to the wetware of the central nervous system of the organism that belongs to the species Homo sapiens.

And then you get, you know, from that an explosion of information versions of non-reductive materialism in terms of analytic philosophy of mind, and especially its approach to the deeply entrenched mind-body problem.

Pff.

Jerry Fodor was there.

Uh-huh.

Thomas Kuhn was in the class.

I sat in on a class given by Thomas Kuhn.

But it, there was this one class where Jerry Fodor and, uh, Noam Chomsky were the, were the instructors, and Thomas Kuhn was in it.

And, and the, the graduate students ended up being a who's who-

Sure

And in fact, it, that's relevant to this project because, um, over the next few years as I moved a bit more into philosophy of biology, I found that many of the issues that had come up as I was thinking of as a philosopher of mind also came up in the philosophy of biology concerning individuals and how we think about them and particularly think about them as sort of boundaries for inquiry.

Um, so, you know, as you know, um, from your background, individualism in the philosophy of mind is a sort of view about, you know, sometimes it's called, you know, early on it was called methodological solipsism by, um, Jerry Fodor, and it was this idea that, you know, all the properties that were really relevant for doing a, a properly scientific cognitive science were in some sense contained within the boundary of the individual.

Technically, it was this, uh, they used this idea of supervenience, the idea that psychological properties supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of individuals.

And, and basically there was an argument about whether that was an appropriate constraint on psychological explanation.

And I don't know that knowing should be included in here because knowing is an achievement term, whereas believing, remembering, noticing, well, noticing maybe is like knowing.

But in any case, it seems that a, I just was r- reading last night, looking at another possible paper for st- us to read by J- Jerry Fodor about methodological solipsism, and [laughs] the idea was there are these, uh, externalists about belief that think that you need to understand the context in which someone is put to even say what the content of their proposition is, that if they're in a different environment, then what they mean in their head could mean something different.

And it seemed like that that raised, I didn't get that far into the Fodor paper to know, but it seemed like that, that raised too many problems.

Like, when you're studying the kind of thing that Davidson's gonna be studying here, r- you need, just detach it, put, have an epoché, have, have a, a, we're, we're gonna put aside whether the belief is true or not.