Book review of Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor:
THE MIND DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY (MIT Press, 2000)

Home | The whole bibliography | My book on Consciousness

Fodor is widely known as the man who defended: 1. the computational theory of mind (that the mind if a computer), 2. the theory of modular cognition (that cognition is structured in modules) and 3. the theory of nativism (that some knowledge is innate). In this book he attacks all three views as premature and incomplete. Fodor argues that these three postulates alone cannot "prove" the mind, especially consciousness. In the face of the overwhelming success that those three postulates have encountered, Fodor first refreshes our minds as to what they stood for originally: cognitive processes are syntactic. Then he confesses his fear that this approach cannot model nonlocal reasoning, i.e. common sense and specifically abduction (he doesn't explain why he is not happy with the countless Artificial Intelligence systems that have modeled abduction). At the same time, he shows that even worse drawbacks are incurred by connectionists (here, again he doesn't really explain what is wrong with learning common sense via neural network training).
Fodor then devotes a chapter to explaining why he doesn't found convincing that the computational model of cognition can be integrated with a Darwinian model of evolution, in other words that the innate knowledge comes from adaptation. In his opinion it is not plausible and it is founded on a misunderstanding of Chomsky's nativism.
Fodor's book sounds more like an extended review of Pinker's and Plotkin's recent bestsellers than an independent essay on mind. Fodor wrote a reminder that Pinker and Plotkin may have found analogies between philosophy, psychology and biology, but analogies do not make a new science.

Permission is granted to download/print out/redistribute this file provided it is unaltered, including credits.