Browse by:

Jerry Fodor

Obit (of sorts) in LRB but well worth reading his IEP entry. Update: here is the NYT obit. I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats… surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat. Cognitive sciencefunctionalismJerry FodorPhilosophy of mindrepresentationalism

Hayek’s Speculative Psychology, The Neuroscience of value Estimation, and the Basis of Normative Individualism

Here’s the opening paragraph of Don Ross’ paper from Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology. Philosophers of mind who re-visit Friedrich Hayek’s The Sensory Order almost sixty years after its publication should feel humbled, perhaps sheepish, on behalf of their discipline. The book is essentially an exercise in abstract speculative mental architecture construction, the kind of…

The Mind as Neural Software?

Here is a superb paper by Gualtiero Piccinini that brings much needed clarity to a longstanding issue. A penultimate ms can be found here. As a consequence, when the behavior of ordinary computers is explained by program execution, the program is not just a description. The program is also a (stable state of a) physical component of…

Clark’s reply to Fodor

This hot off the press. Jerry Fodor, you may recall, reviewed Andy Clark’s latest work Supersizing the Mind in the London Review of Books. In the latest issue, Clark uses the Letters section to respond. As this is a general link I paste in Clark’s letter below.   Letters Vol. 31 No. 6 · Cover…