Jerry Fodor On Mental States - The View of Frege

The View of Frege

But before proposing his own alternative, Fodor still needs to deal with the second relational hypothesis mentioned above: that of Frege, which consists in the idea that intentional attitudes are relations between individuals and objective and abstract propositions. Such propositions, according to Frege, are completely independent from codification in either mental representations or in the representations of natural language. The anti-psychologism which underlies this position is well known: according to Frege, in fact, it is necessary to distinguish the thought which constitutes the sense ("Sinn") of a sentence from its representation in the mind of the speaker. As he writes in Über Sinn und Bedeutung (1892), mental representations are subjective:

"The same representation is not always tied to the same sense, even in the same person. The representation is subjective, varying from person to person….. A painter, a coachman and a zoologist will probably connect very different representations to the name "Bucefalus." The representation essentially distinguishes itself from the sense of a sign. The sense can be common possession of many people and it not a part or mode of the individual psyche. It is impossible to deny that humanity has a common patrimony of thoughts which are transmitted from generation to generation."

The fact that thoughts are not representations, nevertheless, does not mean that they have a nature similar to objects in the external world. In order to account for the peculiarity of their nature, it is necessary to appeal to a "third realm" outside of both the mental and the physical. But this leaves open the epistemological problem of how it is possible for an individual human mind to gain access to such abstract objects of the third realm. As Fodor puts it:

"The main reason for which one simply cannot say 'propositional attitudes are relations with propositions. Period' is that I don’t understand it. I don’t see how it is possible for an organism to be in relation (in an epistemically interesting way) with a proposition except through standing in a (causal/functional) relation with some occurrence of a formula which expresses the proposition. Plato maintains that there is a special intellectual faculty with which one can look at abstract objects. Frege says that we grasp (that which I call) propositions, but I have not found any theory which explains what it means to "grasp" a proposition, other than the observation (in Frege, 1918) that it is not a perception of the senses because its objects are abstract and it is not introspection because its objects are not mental. (Frege also says that grasping a proposition is not the same as grasping a hammer. Obviously not.)

The difficulty illustrated by Fodor is of both an empirical and a conceptual nature. What is at issue is the question of the psychological plausibility of theories: the point, in other words, is that it doesn’t seem possible to determine the nature of mental content only in the abstract, without taking into consideration the conditions which render that content empirically plausible (specifying, for example, how a physical system must be constituted in order for it to be able to instantiate them). Given this empirical limit to conceptual speculation, that which is necessary is some mechanism capable of elaborating mental content. The contact with hypothetical entities of the third realm by way of an unspecified technique of grasping seems to exclude this possibility for Fodor.