Jerry Fodor On Mental Architecture - Fodor and Chomsky

Fodor and Chomsky

Fodor maintains that Noam Chomsky’s criticism of language learning must be extended to cover all essential aspects of thought. In his The Language of Thought of 1975, Fodor presented his "impossibility thesis" with regard to the gradual acquisition of concepts. Suppose you are a child in the first stage of such a process of acquisition and you must try to learn the concept X, a concept of the second stage. If something is a second-stage concept, then it cannot be coextensive with any first-stage concept, otherwise there would be no distinction in expressive power between the first and the second stages, and no basis at all for such a hierarchy of learning stages. But if you are a child who cannot represent the extension of a second-stage concept in terms of the extension of some first-stage concept you are already familiar with, then you cannot represent the extension of that second-stage concept X at all because the first-stage concepts are all that you have at your disposal. And if you cannot represent the extension of the concept, then you cannot learn the concept because the learning of a concept implies the projection and confirmation of the biconditionals that determine that the extension of the concept has been learned. The conclusion is that either higher-stage concepts are indeed representable in terms of (reducible to) lower-stage concepts (in which case there is no basis for the distinctions between stages and the hierarchy crumbles with no actual learning taking place) or there are concepts in the higher-level stages that cannot be represented in the lower-stages, in which case the child cannot learn them. Fodor’s conclusion is that an "extreme innatism" concerning concepts is necessary to explain learning. He will accept, for example, that the complex concept AIRPLANE may be composed out of simpler concepts such as FLYING and MACHINE. But he insists that the human mind is "richly endowed" with many fairly complex concepts such as Machine from birth. This view has been strongly contested.

In The Modularity of Mind, Fodor makes another crucial distinction between his approach to the mental and that of Chomsky. He attributes to Chomsky (and other so-called neo-Cartesians) the view that what are actually innate are (only) the intentional objects of propositional attitudes: the content expressed by the sentences of the language of thought. This, however, flies in the face of Chomsky’s own writings, which have emphasized the existence of organs of the mind similar in structure and function to the modules talked about by Fodor. In any case, Fodor suggests, in this work, that his approach, unlike the others, attempts to explain what is required, other than content, to give rise to behaviour:

"If you say '19' when I say '7 plus 12, please', your reply could undoubtedly be explained in part in reference to your knowledge of numbers. But this is not enough, given that, after all, knowledge does not translate into behaviour in virtue of only the content of propositions. It seems evident that mechanisms are needed which put into action that which is known, mechanisms which have the function of making the organization of behaviour conform to the propositional structures which are known."

The connection between functional architecture and content is therefore required in order to explain one of the most relevant questions of the program of naturalization of the mental and the explanation of behaviour in causal terms.