Psychological Explanation; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology

by Jerry A. Fodor

It is a main purpose of this book to suggest some of the ways in which outstanding issues in the philosophy of psychology tend to converge upon the notion of functional equivalence. Topics Is Psychology Possible?; Behaviorism and Mentalism; Materialism; The Logic of Simulation

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is also the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Fodor is of Jewish descent.

Fodor argues that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintains that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Further, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adheres to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.

For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which are defined by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.

Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, he has in recent years devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposes reductive accounts of the mind. He argues that mental states are multiply realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses.

Reviews

[Jon Stout]

The way that Fodor sees the problem of psychological explanation is by considering how a mental state can explain a physical state, or vice versa. This problem becomes the traditional mind-body problem, or the relationship between mental things, such as thoughts and feelings, and physical things, such as nerves and bodies. There are many possible relationships, and Fodor goes through them all systematically and exhaustively. I can only give a brief gloss.

The first and most conspicuous relationship is some form of physical reductionism, that is to say that mental states can be reduced by definition to physical states, so that there is a logical rather than an empirical connection. Fodor discusses two forms of this which have widespread acceptance among both philosophers and psychologists. The first is behaviorism, as advocated by Watson and Skinner among psychologists, and by Wittgenstein, Ryle and Strawson among philosophers. Behaviorism reduces mental states to behavior, or to dispositions to behavior. The problem is that statements about mental states often seem to lose something when rephrased as about physical states.

An alternate form of physical reductionism is materialism, in which it is argued that mental states can be reduced to states of the brain or of the nervous system. This has philosophical adherents such as Daniel Dennett, and Paul and Patricia Churchland, and psychological adherents among working neuroscientists. The problem with reductive materialism is parallel to the problem with behaviorism, that something is lost in describing mental phenomena in purely neurological terms.

One alternative to these two forms of physical reductionism, is that there is an empirical, contingent relationship between mental and physical states, rather than a connection by definition or by logical necessity. And this is the way that much of psychology works, albeit by including first person reports of mental states in explanations, since the mental states themselves are not publicly observable or verifiable.

There are other possibilities, such as dualism, in the style of Descartes, but this implies interactionism, which is incoherent if there is no connection between the two domains, or parallelism, in the style of Leibniz, which creates more problems than it solves. Another possibility is skepticism that we can have knowledge of the mental states of other minds. But short of absolute certainty, we take for granted some (contingent) knowledge of other minds.

Fodor is exhaustive in exploring these logical possibilities, far more than I can convey in brief. I find him interesting in reducing the problems of psychological explanation to terms familiar from explanation in the physical sciences (namely deductive-nomological explanation as described by Hempel). Fodor is far-reaching in his scope, referencing people as diverse as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz and Noam Chomsky. He goes some distance in making a social science as “hard” as a physical science, and in understanding the difficulties involved.