Jerry Fodor - Fodor and The Nature of Mental States

Fodor and The Nature of Mental States

In his book Propositional Attitudes (1978), Fodor introduced the idea that mental states are relations between individuals and mental representations. Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, the idea that intentional attitudes are relational has remained unchanged from its original formulation up to the present time.

In that book, he attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states. Fodor considers two alternative hypotheses. The first completely denies the relational character of mental states and the second considers mental states as two-place relations. The latter position can be further subdivided into the Carnapian view that such relations are between individuals and sentences of natural languages and the Fregean view that they are between individuals and the propositions expressed by such sentences. Fodor's own position, instead, is that to properly account for the nature of intentional attitudes, it is necessary to employ a three-place relation between individuals, representations and propositional contents.

Considering mental states as three-place relations in this way, representative realism makes it possible to hold together all of the elements necessary to the solution of this problem. Further, mental representations are not only the objects of beliefs and desires, but are also the domain over which mental processes operate. They can be considered the ideal link between the syntactic notion of mental content and the computational notion of functional architecture. These notions are, according to Fodor, our best explanation of mental processes.

Read more about this topic:  Jerry Fodor

Famous quotes containing the words mental states, fodor, nature, mental and/or states:

    ... in doing our psychology, we want to attribute mental states fully opaquely because it’s the fully opaque reading which tells us what the agent has in mind, and it’s what the agent has in mind that causes his behavior.
    Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)

    The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.
    —Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)

    All nature seemed to be
    In perfect harmony.
    James F. Hanley (1892–1942 )

    see the shaky future grow familiar
    in the pinched, indigenous faces
    of these thoroughbred mental cases,
    twice my age and half my weight.
    We are all old-timers,
    each of us holds a locked razor.
    Robert Lowell (1917–1977)

    That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador gave the English no just title to New England, or to the United States generally, any more than to Patagonia.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)