Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It’s hard to credit that Fodor takes seriously the idea that the human memory is like a tape divided into squares, even for the domains (like language parsing) in which he believes that CTM is true.

It is true that, while busied only in considering the manners of other men, I found here, too, scarce any ground for settled conviction, and remarked hardly less contradiction among them than in the opinions of the philosophers.

In addition, I had always a most earnest desire to know how to distinguish the true from the false, in order that I might be able clearly to discriminate the right path in life, and proceed in it with confidence.

Each node typically has a scalar value that represents the likelihood that the proposition it represents is true, and the pathways encode relationships of consistency among the propositions.

A massive number of encapsulated modules could meet the abduction challenge if it were true, he concedes, since it would confine an inference engine to the information relevant to solving a problem.

But in fact, he goes on to argue, it is not true, so that option is not available.

There is nothing in the ??evolutionary??, or the ??biological??, or the ??scientific?? worldview that shows, or even suggests, that the proper function of cognition is other than the fixation of true beliefs? (p. 68). To suggest otherwise, he claims, is ?neo-Darwinist anti-intellectualism?.

And contrary to Fodor’s claim that nothing in the evolutionary worldview ‘even suggests’ that the function of cognition is something other than believing true things, here are five things that suggest exactly that.

There is little point, for example, in spending twenty minutes figuring out a shortcut that saves you ten minutes in travel time. Second, outside the realm of mathematics and logic, there is no such thing as a universal true-belief-fixer.

In other words, there is an important difference between a system designed to fixate likely beliefs in an ancestral world and a system designed to fixate true beliefs in this world.