Are frege cases exceptions to intentional generalizations?

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 1-22

  Aydede, Murat ^a   Robbins, Philip ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL AUTÓNOMA DE MÉXICO   (Mexico)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010847704     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.2001.10717558     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. As Fodor himself might put it, exceptionhood on the cheap threatens to collapse laws of the form (i) Fs cause Gs ceteris paribus into laws of the form (ii) Fs cause Gs unless they don't. (J. A. Fodor, 'Making Mind Matter More', Philosophical Topics 67 [1990] 59-79)
2. Compare Fodor's own remarks, in the first chapter of Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1987)
3. about the psychology of Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
4. T1 and T2 appear verbatim in Fodor labeled as such (The Elm and the Expert, 42).
5. Fodor also offers a substantially weakened version of this thesis in a footnote (The Elm and the Experts, 122-3n. 3). We will come to it below, in section IV.l.
6. That this reading is the intended one is suggested by Fodor's parenthetical remark on Tl, where he notes: 'if an agent has no views about what he would prefer if all the facts were in, then if he is forced to choose, the rational thing for him to do is flip a coin' (The Elm and the Expert, 42).
7. D. Arjo, 'Sticking Up for Oedipus: Fodor on Intentional Generalizations and Broad Content', Mind and Language 11 (1996) 231-45, makes roughly the same point.
8. Note, however, that Fodor's officially stated aim is not to show that broad psychology is true, but to show that it might be true. He writes: 'I therefore propose to argue, in this lecture, that it is plausible - not unreasonable to believe - that... for all we know, the laws of intentional psychology may well be broad... I pause for emphasis: I'm not going to argue that psychological laws should be broadly construed.... What I am going to argue is this: the considerations that have been supposed to show that an externalist construal of content won't meet the purposes of psychological explanation are, on balance, unconvincing. So maybe narrow content is superfluous' (The Elm and the Expert, 28).
9. Fodor might perhaps object that if your degree of conviction that you wouldn't change your mind after updating is low enough, then you are not making a rational choice after all. But remember the circumstances we are imagining are such that it is not optional for the agent to gather more information: she just can't. Nevertheless, she uses, in an epistemically responsible way, all the evidence she can responsibly gather. The demands of rationality, we take it, extend no further than this. See K. Bach, 'Default Reasoning: Jumping to Conclusions and Knowing When to Think Twice', Philosophical Quarterly 65 (1984) 37-58 for discussion of the inevitable tradeoffs between reliability and efficiency that real-world (i.e., resource-bounded) rational choice involves.
10. P. Pietroski and G. Rey, "When Other Things Aren't Equal: Saving Ceteris Paribus Laws From Vacuity', British journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 [1995] 81-110.)
11. Where the notion of justification is internalist, as noted. At least until recently, Fodor himself used to insist on an internalist notion of rationality: 'according to the present view, questions of rationality are assessed with respect to the vehicle of a belief as well as its content; whereas questions of truth are assessed with respect to content alone.... It's because the vehicle of his belief that his mother was eligible was, say, "J is eligible" rather than, say, "Mother is eligible" that [Oedipus]'s seeking to marry his mother was not irrational in face of his abhorrence of incest' ('Substitution Arguments and the individuation of Belief.' Reprinted in A Tlteory of Content and Other Essays [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1990], 17n. l0).
12. See also 'Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology', reprinted in Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1981), 241-3, where the same claim is elaborated in terms of an internalistically understood notion of content, rather than in terms of vehicles of content.
13. We don't think this is likely, but since Fodor's writing on this issue isn't very clear and there are passages which seem to suggest that he regards Oedipus' behavior as rationally defective (or at least 'rash'; see The Elm and the Expert, 46)
14. Millikan, 'White Queen Psychology; or, the Last Myth of the Given', reprinted in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1993), especially sections 1-5.
15. See The Elm and the Expert, 43-7.
16. M. Aydede, 'Has Fodor Really Changed His Mind on Narrow Content?' [Mind and Language 12 (1997) 422-58]
17. for details.) This might be the real insight behind Fodor's argument. On the other hand, the successful folk practice of explaining in terpersonal Frege cases suggests that there must be a viable notion of narrow content - at least if we assume that this practice is, as Fodor likes to say, 'intentional through and through' (Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong [New York: Oxford University Press 1998], 7).
18. M. Aydede, 'Fodor on Concepts and Frege Puzzles', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1998) 289-94
19. and 'On the Type/Token Relation of Mental Representations', Facta Philosophica 2 (2000) 23-49 for a critique of this proposal.