Andrew Brook

In his recent book, The Elm and the Expert, Fodor attempts to reconcile the computational model of human cognition with information‐theoretic semantics, the view that semantic, and mental, content consists of nothing more than causal or nomic relationships, between words and the world, or (roughly) brain states and the world. In this paper, we do not challenge the project. Nor do we show that Fodor has failed to carry it out. instead, we urge that his analysis, when made explicit, turns out rather differently than he thinks. In particular, in some places where he sees problems, he sometimes shows that there is no problem. And while he says two conceptions of information come to much the same thing, his analysis shows that they are very different. This is rather strange.

In "How language helps us think", Jackendoff explores some of the relationships between language, consciousness, and thought, with a foray into attention and focus. In this paper, we will concentrate on his treatment of consciousness. We will examine three aspects of it: I. the method he uses to arrive at his views; 2. the extent to which he offers us a theory of consciousness adequate to assess his views; and 3. some of the things that we might need to add to what he offers to achieve an adequate theory.

My comments will focus on the issue of what, according to Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, hereafter G&Z; all references will be to this book unless otherwise noted), the phenomenological approach can contribute to the cognitive sciences (including cognitive neuroscience), one of their major themes. Toward the end of the paper, I will say something about a second major theme of theirs, the relationship of phenomenology to philosophy of mind. Conventional wisdom within cognitive science has it is that phenomenology is hostile to the scientific study of human cognition. Hubert Dreyfus, a self-declared phenomenologist, writes works with titles such as What computers can’t do (1972) and What computers still can’t do (1992), both of which urge that the attempt to understand the mind as a computational information-processor, at any rate, is doomed to failure. Since the computational, information-processing model is the only remotely worked-out scientific model of cognition that we have, it is not too surprising that phenomenology and cognitive science have generally been viewed as being at loggerheads.