A Study Of Fodor’s Thought Of Mental Representation

As the core category and basic setting of the first generation of cognitive science,mental representation has been widely criticized in the literature of cognitive science.Whether we should commit to mental representation has become a fundamental question of cognitive science,and a group of philosophers concerned with cognitive science have given their own responses to this question.J·Fodor is one of the best philosophers in this group.He constructed a large number of extremely creative and challenging speculative arguments to defend mental representation.At the same time,He developed his famous The Representational Theory of Mind(RTM)based on the mental representation he committed to,and within this theory he addresses the naturalization of intentionality.The content of this article is as follows:It is the introduction in the first chapter.It first introduces the background and research significance of the topic.Then,it introduces the current research situation at home and abroad,from which we can roughly understand the philosophers’ answers to the questions about the commitment,kinds and naturalization of content of mental representation,as well as the introduction and evaluation of Fodor’s many viewpoints.Finally,it will explain the writing ideas of this paper,point out the innovation and various deficiencies of this paper.It mainly analyzes some categories such as representation and proposition in the second chapter.In the first section,several domestic translations of "representation" will be briefly discussed.In order to avoid confusion of terms,this section will also make corresponding translation conventions.Then we will list and evaluate some definitions of representation and mental representation by philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists.In the second section,it introduces the propositional views of Frege,Russell,Wittgenstein and others around the two questions about proposition.Fodor’s definition of proposition was deeply influenced by these people.In the third section,it introduces one way that cognitive psychologists classify representations.By means of this classification,the object of discussion is transformed from representation to propositional mental representation.In the fourth section,it introduces Fodor’s propositional view and his definition of mental representation based on his nine working hypotheses.At the same time,it points out that in essence the fourth chapter is to answer the question of how the working hypothesis of intentional realism is compatible with the working hypothesis of naturalism.It is mainly divided into three sections in the third chapter.The first and second sections will introduce Fodor’s defense of mental representation from two aspects of propositional attitude theory and folk psychology respectively.In the theory of propositional attitude,Fodor claims that the direct object of propositional attitude is mental representation(mental statement)rather than the proposition itself,and thus shows that we can solve Frege’s puzzle and belief puzzle without giving up the referential theory of meaning by committing to mental representation.In folk psychology,Fodor argues that the effective causal generalizations of folk psychology,which are used to explain and predict the behavior of organisms,are formed by referring to the contents carried by mental representations.Without mental representation,these useful generalizations cease to exist,and folk psychology thus loses its legitimacy.In the third section,it introduces the Representational Theory of Mind formed by Fodor around mental representation.Then it points out that based on this theory,the question of how the naturalization of intentionality is possible can be transformed into the question of how the propositional content of mental representation is naturalized.It focuses on the naturalization of the propositional content of mental representation in the fourth chapter.First of all,we can see that by means of a series of semantic assumptions(i.e.,combinatorial view of meaning,atomism of meaning,and referential theory of meaning),Fodor turned the question of how naturalization of propositional content of mental representation is possible into the question:what is it that that connects the primitive internal symbol to the external world?Then,we can see the theory presented by Fodor is The Crude Causal Theory(CCT),but the theory has faced various criticisms,three of which(the depth problem,the breadth problem,and the disjunctive problem)and Fodor’s response to them will be introduced.In particular,in order to deal with the problem of disjunction,Fodor transformed into SLCCT by adding asymmetric dependence on CCT.But SLCCT still faces some criticism.It attempts to raise such an accusation and then points out that we can try a version of the similarity theory in the fifth chapter,which may be compatible with Fodor’s causal covariant theory.We need to be a combination of the two,not the opposite.Finally,the author makes some reflections and points out that we can try to evaluate Fodor’s representational theory of mind and causal covariant theory from four aspects.