Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

There is also no account of free word order phenomena, characteristic of many languages of the world.

Fourth, the details of the recursive structures are largely arbitrary and learned, conforming to the words and constructions of the linguistic community, rather than being dictated by immediate real-world constraints such as how a scene is put together or which sequence of actions is physically capable of effecting a goal.

It combines the key idea of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—that the mind is a computational system—with the key idea of the new evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s—that signs of design in the natural world are products of the natural selection of replicating entities, namely genes.

The system is designed in such a way that one representation causes another to come into existence; and these changes mirror the laws of some normatively valid system like logic, statistics, or laws of cause and effect in the world.

It bridges the world of mind and matter, dissolving the ancient paradox of how seemingly ethereal entities like reasons, intentions, meanings, and beliefs can interact with the physical world.

But after I had been occupied several years in thus studying the book of the world, and in essaying to gather some experience, I at length resolved to make myself an object of study, and to employ all the powers of my mind in choosing the paths I ought to follow, an undertaking which was accompanied with greater success than it would have been had I never quitted my country or my books.

This is behind Chomsky’s idea that there is a single Universal Grammar that applies to all the world’s languages despite their differences in overt words and constructions.

And it differs from the claim that intelligence can be understood only by considering what mental states refer to in the world, or by examining the incarnate person embedded in a physical and social context.

Fodor emphasizes the idea that the representations in a computational system are syntactic: they are composed of parts in some arrangement, and the causal mechanisms of the system are sensitive to the identity and arrangement of those parts rather than to what they refer to in the world.

Our affective repertoire comprises emotions pertaining to the physical world, such as fear and disgust, and emotions pertaining to the social and moral worlds, such as trust, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, anger, and humor.