Jerry Fodor On Mental States - The Carnapian View

The Carnapian View

Fodor concludes that this position is "hopeless." But it remains for Fodor to deal with the second, and more common, position of intentional attitude attributions as two-place relations. Fodor further subdivides this alternative into two separate theses. The first, attributed to Rudolf Carnap, considers mental states as relations between individuals and sentences of natural language; the second, attributed to Gottlob Frege, considers the relation to be between individuals and propositions.

The position expressed by Carnap in Meaning and Necessity, taken up by Hartry Field in 1978 and Gilbert Harman in 1982, is interesting because it seeks to maintain the intuition that mental states are relational, without the necessity of any ontological commitment with respect to such conceptually troublesome entities as mental representations. Fodor presents several arguments which he believes justifies its rejection. First, he suggests that Carnap’s theory is fundamentally behavioristic. Carnap, that is, has one theory regarding the objects of intentional attitudes and a second theory regarding the character of the relation of individuals with such objects. The second theory is behavioristic because, for Carnap, "to believe such and such is to be disposed ...in specifiable conditions... to proffer occurrences of the correspondent of the sentences which attribute beliefs. But, patently, beliefs are not behavioural dispositions and, a fortiori, are not dispositions to proffer anything." In simpler terms, since behaviourism is presumably false, then there must be something wrong in some part of Carnap’s explanation of propositional attitudes.

But Fodor also has some more interesting and persuasive criticisms to level at the Carnapian view. His second argument is to the effect that Carnap’s theory can most naturally be read as a theory which considers the type-identity of the correspondents of sentences which attribute beliefs as necessary and sufficient conditions for the type-identity of the beliefs actually attributed since Carnap was primarily concerned with the opacity of beliefs. His approach, therefore, was based on a strategy of inheriting the opacity of beliefs from the opacity of citations. The problem is that this strategy fails in every case in which the identity conditions of beliefs are different from the identity conditions for sentences. For example, it is likely that the sentences "Phil believes that Alice shot Fred" and "Phil believes that Fred was shot by Alice" attribute type-identical beliefs. But they are clearly not type-identical sentences. Fodor points out that a way around this problem would be to admit that objects of belief are, essentially, systems of translations of sentences. But this results in circularity. One way of characterizing the relation of translation between sentences is by reference to the communicative intentions of speakers-hearers. But we cannot then "identify the translations in reference to the intentions while, simultaneously, individuating the propositional attitudes (including intentions) in reference to the translations. Along the same lines, one can believe that it is raining without being able to speak English. This implies, once again, that objects of belief must be systems of translation and we end up in something like the circle described above.

Fodor’s solution is to abandon the idea that propositional attitudes are relations between individuals and sentences of natural languages while not abandoning the idea that they are relations between individuals and sentences tout court. He proposes that the relation is between individuals and internal sentences, or systems of mental representations.