The Elm and the Expert Quotes

“Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“The correlation between elms and the botanist's elm thoughts was hard earned; think of all the dreary years he must have spent in graduate school learning to be a reliable elm-detector. Whereas I can now correlate my thoughts with elms practically instantaneously: My mind-world correlation co-opts his [insofar as I use his expertise to identify elms], much as, in the other case, the correlation between my acid thoughts and acids co-opts the correlation between acidity and the color of litmus. What philosophers call 'linguistic deference' is actually the use of experts as instruments; not Marxist division of labor in semantics but capitalist exploitation in epistemology.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics