Georges Rey

Fodor and LePore's attack on conceptual role semantics relies on Quine's attack on the traditional analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, which in turn consists of four arguments: an attack on truth by convention; an appeal to revisability; a claim of confirmation holism; and a charge of explanatory vacuity. Once the different merits of these arguments are sorted out, their proper target can be seen to be not the Traditional Distinctions, but an implicit assumption about their superficial availability that we have abundant reason to reject. Once we reject it, we can see how issues of the absorbtion of conventions, the revisability of belief, and confirmation holism are compatible with the Traditional Distinctions, and that Quine's discussion only serves to camouflage the question of whether some confirmation relations are constitutive of meaning and knowable a priori

One would have thought that Fodor's justly famous computational views about the mind and his covariation approaches to content owed a lot to the twentieth century that he now reviles. On the other hand, a number of lines he pursues in the target article make one wonder whether he hasn’t perhaps changed his mind about those famous views. Specifically, I argue that his own theory of content is open to the very same objections he raises against ‘sorting’ theories, and that the supposed circularity in implicit definitions of logical particles can easily be avoided by the very functional/computational definitions that he fathered decades ago. Fodor's rejection here of sorting and implicit definition does make one worry that he is now opting for what seems the only atomistic alternative that would seem to be left, the first‐person meaning mysticism of the very Cartesian sort he now claims to favor, but from which I would have thought twentieth century role and discrimination views were a welcome relief. Despite all these worries, however, I concede that one could probably do worse than assume for the nonce that meaning is atomic, or, anyway, unanalyzed, and get on with investigating the mind on that basis—but keeping the options open.

Elsewhere I have argued that standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking seriously talk of “representations of” standard linguistic entities (“SLEs”), such as NPs, VPs, morphemes, phonemes, syntactic and phonetic features. However, it is very doubtful there are tokens of these “things” in space and time. Moreover, even if were, their existence would be completely inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. Their existence is an illusion: an extremely stable perceptual state we regularly enter as a result of being stimulated by the wave forms we regularly produce when we execute our intentions to utter such tokens (a view I call “Folieism”). In his Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt objects to this view, arguing that, “On Rey’s view, communication seems to rest on miraculous guesses.” I argue here that my view is not prey to his objections, and actually affords a scientifically more plausible view than his “empiricist” alternative. Specifically, I reply to his objections that my view couldn’t explain the conventionality of language and success of communication (§2.1), that I am faced with intractable difficulties surrounding the identity of intentional inexistents (§2.2), and that, contrary to my view, SLEs can be relationally defined (§2.3). Not only can Folieism survive Devitt’s objections, but (§3) it also provides a more satisfactory account of the role of linguistic intuitions than the “empirical” account on which he insists

The present article articulates the strategy of much of my work to date, which has been concerned to understand how we can possibly come to have any objective understanding of the mind. Generally, I align myself with those who think the best prospect of such an understanding lies in a causal/computational/representational theory of thought (CRTT). However, there is a tendency in recent developments of this and related philosophical views to burden the crucial property of intentionality with what I call Strong Externalism, a state’s intentional content being determined by some real external phenomenon to which the state is causally related. I argue against this tendency, drawing attention to the crucial role in cognitive scientific explanations of empty concepts, such as [angel], and the “intentional inexistents” that such concepts “represent.” This obliges me to take a brief excursion into what I hope is a minimal metaphysics, defending a methodology I call the “LEXX” strategy that treats phenomena as real only insofar as they are needed in genuine explanations. After a brief discussion of the need for greater patience generally regarding a theory of intentionality, I deploy this strategy with regard to many phenomena that are the purported objects of mental states, e.g. triangles, cones, words, sentences, colors, mental images and qualia. I argue that these phenomena do not actually exist: they are mere intentional inexistents, unreal projections of the intentional content of various mental states, and not themselves needed in any genuine explanations. In a concluding section, I summarize my suggestions about how a CRTT can explain the various illusions we have in this regard, particularly those concerning consciousness and qualia.

I argue that, pace Chomsky (2000, 2003), standard theories of linguistic competence are committed to taking talk of representations seriously, in particular, to recognizing that the “of x” clause that invariably follows “representation” is a way of specifying that representation’s intentional content. One reason to insist upon intentional content in such cases is that the “x” in “of x” may not exist (as in "of Zeus"). This issue is especially relevant to linguistics since, recapitulating considerations raised by many linguists, I go on to argue that most of the SLEs themselves seldom, if ever exist: it is doubtful there are many, if any, tokens of them in space and time; indeed, their existence is by and large inessential to the needs of either communication or serious linguistic theory. All that linguistic theory requires to be real in this regard are the representations, presumably entokened in people’s brains, understood, however, in terms of their intentional contents.

Wittgenstein’s views invite a modest, functionalist account of mental states and regularities, or more specifically a causal/computational, representational theory of the mind (CRTT). It is only by understandingWittgenstein’s remarks in the context of a theory like CRTT that his insights have any real force; and it is only by recognizing those insights that CRTT can begin to account for sensations and our thoughts about them. For instance, Wittgenstein’s (in)famous remark that “an inner process stands in need of outward criteria” (PI:§580), so implausible read behaviorally, is entirely plausible if the “outward” is allowed to include computational facts about our brains. But what is especially penetrating about Wittgenstein’s discussion is his unique diagnosis of our puzzlement in this area, in particular, his suggestion that it is due to our captivation by “pictures” whose application to reality is left crucially under-specified. It is only by understanding. What sustains the naive picture is not a captivation by language, but, at least in part, our largely involuntary reactions to things that look and act like our conspecifics. We project a property into them correlative to that reaction in ourselves, and are, indeed, unwilling to project it into things that do not induce that reaction