I’m still going on about Fodor’s ‘Concepts’[1].
In Chapter 7, Fodor tries to minimise the concepts that his Informational Atomism is required to render innate by differentiating mind-dependent and mind-independent concepts. The mind-independent concepts are a recent feature of humanity’s collect mental life as they are typified by the natural kinds that science has only recently discovered (according to Fodor).
Mind-dependent concepts lock on to the way that a thing ‘strikes us’ rather than the thing in itself. This is basically a phenomenal/noumenal distinction that allows only the scientific method/community to give us access to the thing-in-itself.
Fodor maintains that the mind-dependence of a concept does not mean that the concepts do no correspond to anything real. Really? I thought that’s exactly what mind-dependence entailed. No, says Fodor, because minds are real. If minds are real then there is a basis for saying that mind-dependent concepts are real. Suspicions are raised at this point by the observation that the idealist is put out of work because they cannot deny that minds are real. They are realists after all. It looks like, sounds like, smells like Fodor has moved the posts so as to rule idealism out.
Fodor uses the example of Tuesday as a day of the week. It is mind-dependent that there are Tuesdays, but this does not mean that it is not real. Yet, either ‘Tuesday’ corresponds to some specific period of time that really passes (even if contextually defined) or it does not. There does not appear to be any middle ground that would not equally apply to unicorns, if only there is someone or some community who believes in them and talks as if they exist somewhere. It places no extra constraint upon mind-dependent real things to say that our tokening of a concept was caused by some mind-independent thing as every (mortal) mental state is presumably caused by something.
I’m sure that the modifier that will end up doing the work to distinguish real mind-dependent thing from unreal mind-dependent things will be ‘in the right kind of way’, as in, ‘A mind-dependent concept only reflects reality if it has been tokened in the right kind of way.’ Ad hoc much?
[1] Fodor, J. A., ‘Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong’ (1998) Clarendon Press: Oxford pp. 127-8
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