Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-109.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....which operates on a representation has little, if any, effect on its semantic properties [56] However, a general assumption is often made such that the knowledge of a representation can be treated as its semantics, meaning as truth conditions [12] although we have no means of measuring it. Fodor [13] introduced the notion of methodological splipsism which suggests that this lack of measurable correlation between a representation and its semantics can be overcome by mirroring the semantic properties in the representation s structure making the former transparent to the processes that operate ....

....the representation s structure making the former transparent to the processes that operate on the representation. By keeping the semantic properties consis tent in a representation as a coherent network of beliefs, one aims to facilitate correct and successful interpretation of a representation [13]. Furthermore, changes in the structure of a representation alters the underlying context therefore its semantics. This can be modelled as belief revision [16] Com putationally, Bayesian belief networks have been widely adopted for the task of encoding knowledge as semantics of visual behaviour ....

J.A. Fodor. Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1):63-109, 1980.

....in this section, as important as they are in formalizing thought processes, remain committed to the solely explicit forms of representation and to the formality assumptions of classical logic. In specific, they assume independence of the syntax and semantics in the way understood by Fodor [14]: What makes syntactic operations a species of formal operations is that being syntactic is a way of not being semantic. Formal operations are the ones that are specified without reference to such semantic properties of representations as, for example, truth, reference, and meaning. GOFAI ....

Fodor, J. A. Methodological Solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Brain and Behaviour Sciences 3, 63-109 (1980).

....role; another kind of attitude which is strong enough to describe a person s psychology. For this, the most common strategy is to adopt sentential attitudes, replacing the proposition with something like a sentence. Fodor is perhaps the best known advocate of this strategy. Fodor s solution (Fodor, 1980) is to recommend what Putnam calls methodological solipsism focusing on the agent s contribution to propositional attitudes, subtracting away the context. Fodor then takes a Realist stance to the agent s contribution to propositional attitudes (Fodor, 1985) According to Fodor, a Realist ....

....will look very much like derived intentionality. With this view, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities in between, and learning can even move in this space. This admits of both evolved organisms and artifacts having intentionality, but to radically different degrees. Fodor s folk psychology Fodor (1980; 1985) proposes a representational theory of mind for folk psychology; this is based on a sentential interpretation of propositional attitudes. Fodor s justification for this is twofold. First, it puts a theory behind propositional attitudes a theory which allows propositions to be generated ....

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Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-73.

....the environment, rather than as internal models that substitute for things in the world in the overlayed traditional sense of re presentation. Rutkowska 1996) Cognitivist Grounding Typical for the cognitivist paradigm is a perceptioncognition distinction (cf. e.g. Rutkowska 1996) such as Fodor s (1980, 1983) distinction into input systems (e.g. low level visual and auditory perception) and central systems (e.g. thought and problem solving) Input systems are typically considered responsible for transducing percepts onto internal representations, whereas the central systems manipulate reason ....

Fodor, J. A. (1980) Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3: 63-110.

.... notion of meaning that is relevant to understanding how my inner mental representations manage to get me to do what I do, but they don t need to worry about wide content, since that depends on factors outside the cognitive system and hence cannot be relevant to the causal operation of the system (Fodor, 1980). So far so good. Philosophers then rightly go on to explore these issues in greater depth. What exactly are narrow content and wide content How are they related What kind of content should matter to the cognitive scientist either or both or neither and so on. However, the discussion quickly ....

Fodor, J. A. (1980) Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-73.

....is strong enough to describe a person s psychology. For this, the most common strategy is to adopt sentential attitudes, replacing the proposition with something like a sentence. Common sense psychology in philosophy 23 Fodor is, perhaps, the best known advocate of this strategy. Fodor s solution (Fodor, 1980) is to recommend what Putnam calls methodological solipsism focusing on the agent s contribution to propositional attitudes, subtracting away the context. Fodor then takes a Realist stance to the agent s contribution to propositional attitudes (Fodor, 1985) According to Fodor, a Realist ....

....very much like derived intentionality. With this view, there is a whole spectrum of possibilities in between, and learning can even move in this space. This admits of both evolved organisms and artifacts having intentionality, but usually to radically different degrees. Fodor s folk psychology Fodor (1980; 1985) proposes a representational theory of mind for folk psychology; this is based on a sentential interpretation of propositional attitudes. Fodor s justification for this is twofold. First, it puts a theory behind propositional attitudes a theory which allows propositions to be generated ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-73.

....on the computational theory of mind, giving an extended and good description of one computational model of thinking (production systems) and he discusses the McCulloch Pitts (1943) theory of mental computation. He takes an internalist, methodologically solipsistic stance (without mentioning Fodor 1980): The information in an internal representation is all that we can know about the world (p. 84) and he presents and tries to rebut the Chinese Room Argument (Searle 1980) and (more briefly) the arguments of Penrose 1989, 1994. He discusses connectionism, correctly noting that Connectionism is ....

Fodor, Jerry A. (1980), `Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, pp. 63--109.

....a canvas must have the right history it must actually have been painted by Picasso. Much the same point can be made about real 100 bills. A master counterfeiter might produce a bill that is an atom for atom replica 20 This idea, or something like it, is suggested in Stich (1978, 1983) and in Fodor (1980, 1987, 1991) For the original account of Putnamian doppelg ngers, see Putnam (1975) 15 of one produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But it would still not be a real 100 bill. Indeed, as Fodor has noted, not even God can make a real 100 bill. Only a branch of the U.S. Treasury ....

Fodor, J. (1980). "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3.

....of computability and the Church Turing thesis, a classical, symbolic conception of computational psychology urges that the theorist view epistemic devices as syntactic engines. Another way of expressing this is that a symbolic computational psychology is committed to methodological solipsism (cf. Fodor, 1980). Methodological solipsism is the term for a particular way of thinking about mental processes, whereby an explanation of those mental processes must proceed without reference to semantic properties of representations such as truth, reference or meaning. Accepting the theoretical force of ....

....theoretical force of methodological solipsism means that the computational psychologist rejects, utterly and without reservation, any conception of the mind as a semantic engine. For quite some time in the literature, there have been advocates of the syntactic engine as a model of the mind (cf. Fodor, 1980; Stitch 1983; Churchland, 1990) and advocates of the semantic engine as a model of the mind (cf. Dennett, 1981; Haugeland, 1981) with both schools remaining cooly contemptuous of the other. But a possible taxonomy of Engines does not stop at a black and white choice of either syntactic or ....

Fodor, J.A. (1980) Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3. Reprinted in Fodor, J.A.

....transparent reading of computationalism. Inasmuch as such explicitation does not count as conceptual change, then it is a refutation of a more direct sort the transparent approach is not required. 3. 4 Externalism Mental states are relationally individuated [10] computational states are not [4], therefore computation cannot explain mentality [11] 5] That s the externalist objection to computationalism, in a subtlety ravaging nutshell. The transparent approach is to question the second premise. Peacocke has done just this by arguing that even conventional computational explanations ....

J. Fodor. Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive science. In J. Haugeland, editor, Mind design, pages 307--338. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981.

....with the environment, rather than as internal models that substitute for things in the world in the overlayed traditional sense of re presentation. Rutkowska, 1996) Cognitivist Grounding Typical for the cognitivist paradigm is a perception cognition distinction (cf. Rutkowska, 1996) such as Fodor s (1980, 1983) distinction into input systems (e.g. low level visual and auditory perception) and central systems (e.g. thought and problem solving) Input systems are typically considered responsible for transducing percepts onto internal representations, whereas the central systems manipulate reason ....

Fodor, J. A. (1980) Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences vol. 3, 63-110.

....so because the theory of belief is (partially) an empirical theory about empirical subjects which can hardly be conceived as something like pure contentmachines (i.e. as epistemic systems operating directly with pure contents) in particular if there are infinitely many contents. This thought led Fodor (1980) to the formulation of his computational or syntactic theory of the mind (which appears in Fodor 1987, ch.1, as the representational theory of the mind) However, the syntax of the mind should presumably not be considered as analogous to natural or formal languages; very likely our models of a ....

Fodor, J.A. (1980), "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology", The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 63-73.

....was to further support the first feature of the cognitive revolution. Only if all information on which the mind brain had to rely was represented within the system could the system function by applying formal rules to syntactically structured representations. Thus, it is not surprising that Fodor (1980) also endorses a program of methodological solipsism for cognitive science. The reemergence of connectionism as a modeling framework in cognitive science is particularly problematic in light of these features of the cognitive revolution. Connectionism seems far more suitable to modeling lower ....

Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-109.

....but there is nothing internal to the system that gives the symbols any meaning. If this is true, then computers stand in clear contrast to humans, whose mental states possess intrinsic meaning. 2. The literature on narrow and wide content started with Putnam (1975) and has been developed by Fodor (1980) and Burge (1984) among many others. 3. It should be noted that an internalist view on content does not preclude content from being a referential notion. A mental state may possess internalist semantic content by virtue of reference to some object or concept in a subject s notional world ....

Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63--109.

....life: nothing else is needed. However, as I argued in Chapter 2, rules do not function on their own. They need a Background, or a basis in a training process and a form of life to be able to function properly. In section one of this chapter I mentioned the formality condition which is due to Fodor (1981a). It means that mental processes depend on the formal aspects of mental representations. Formal here simply means syntactic. Mental processes thus depend only on syntactic properties of mental representations. The semantic properties of mental states are not seen as playing any role in ....

Fodor, J.A. (1981), Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology, in: Representations, Brighton (Sussex): The Harvester Press, pp.225--253

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Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-109.

No context found.

Fodor, J.A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 63-110.

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J. Fodor, (1980). Methodological Solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Vol.3, 417-424.

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Fodor, Jerry A. (1980), "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 63--109.

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Jerry A. Fodor, "Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology", Behavioural and Brain Sciences, , pp. 63-109, 1980.

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Fodor, J. A., 1981. Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology, Representations: Philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science, Cambridge: MIT Press, 225-253.

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Jerry A. Fodor, "Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology", Behavioural and Brain Sciences, , pp. 63-109, 1980.

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