Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Whatever mechanism underlies inner speech—presumably the phonological loop that makes up a major component of working memory—it is not subject matter of any familiar theory of grammatical competence.

But even at the level of linguistic theory proper (without considering experiments), lexical entries appear to be significantly redundant.

Second, syntactic trees have a characteristic structure, in which each constituent contains a distinguished member, the head, which determines the category and semantic referent of the constituent, and around which the other elements are grouped as arguments and modifiers (this is the basis of the X-bar theory of phrase structure).

Abstract: In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation.

But for reasons that soon become clear, a more fitting title might be No One Ever Said it Did. Fodor calls the theory in How the Mind Works the New Synthesis.

The first major theme of HTMW is computation, and Fodor, more than anyone, has defended what he calls the computational theory of mind: that thinking is a form of computation.

Deriving new accurate beliefs from old ones in pursuit of a goal is not a bad definition of ‘intelligence’, so a principal advantage of the computational theory of mind (CTM) is that it explains how a hunk of matter (a brain or a computer) can be intelligent.

The beauty of Fodor’s original formulation is that it embraces a variety of systems that we might call ‘computational’, including ones that perform parallel computation, analogue computation (as in slide rules and adding machines), and fuzzy computation (in which graded physical variables represent the degree to which something is true, or the probability that something is true, and the physical transitions are designed to mirror operations in probability theory or fuzzy logic rather than in classical logic).

At the same time, the computational theory of mind is by no means empty or necessary.

The fact that we love our siblings but don’t want to have sex with them, and may want to have sex with attractive strangers without necessarily loving them, is inexplicable by a theory of social psychology that doesn’t distinguish among kinds of human relationships but appeals only to global drives like ‘positive affect’.