Mental representations, computability and intentionality: Jerry Fodor's approach

The paper is devoted to Jerry Fodor's classical computational theory of mind. Fodor is one of the brightest proponents of the theory, the one who developed it during almost all his research career. The paper discusses the major features of classical computationalism which starts from the Turing idea. The classical approach describes the mind as an independent program level. There is no great necessity in the knowledge of brain neurobiology, because we can describe the mind as an autonomous level, equal to the program level of the computer. The main point of the computational theory of mind is that the brain is a real analog of the computer, and the mind is a real analog of the program level: it is not a system which we could only describe as a set of programs, but a system which lacks the corresponding ontological status. The main feature of the work of this level is that syntactically driven computations are made over the mind's symbols - concepts. Computations are independent of the meaning of concepts; and the only thing the system should 'know' is the formal rules which govern the behaviour of concepts. The major advantage of a classical approach is that it could explain intentionality via causal links between objects in the world and symbols in the mind. It is shown that this explanation of intentionality can block John Searle's well-known Chinese Room argument. One of the strongest sides of a classical model is that it could explain intentionality, on the one hand, without appealing to biology terms and, on the other hand, without relativising or eliminating it. Another advantage of computation-alism is that it uses such notions as mental states and understands mental states as representations. Of course, the computational theory of mind lost many of its proponents just because of the rising of opposing models - connectionism, for instance. And there has always been a strong eliminativism movement in philosophy of mind which finds additional power within connectionism, but classical computationalism has its own advantages because it saves and uses the notion of mental representations and intentionality and comports with our common-sense view.

Keywords

Authors

References