In the never-ending quest for effort-free blog content, I reproduce below my comment submitted for moderation here:
Is Fodor’s use of triangulation (a form of which he attributes to Davidson) to solve the ‘Which Link?’ problem for causal theories of perceptual thought (pp. 205-215) also a novelty?
I did not find it very convincing.
The ‘Which Link?’ problem he says his approach solves relates to there being many things along a causal chain terminating in a perceptual thought other than that which we would say the perceptual thought is about: a cerebral cortex at one extreme and the big bang at the other.
Fodor’s account of Davidson’s version of triangulation in a situation of radical interpretation has the field linguist and the native encountering a hairy snake. The referent of the native’s resulting utterance is ‘the one where the causal chain from the world to the speaker (/thinker) intersects the causal chain from the world to his interpreter when the speaker and the interpreter are caused to utter tokens of the same type.’
Fodor’s adjustments to his account of Davidson’s version is to deal in thoughts rather than utterances, and to use a counterfactual counterpart of the same person to achieve triangulation, rather than a distinct speaker and an interpreter. Thus, if I perceive a hairy snake, I have a perceptual thought of the hairy snake – and not the big bang – in virtue of the fact that my counterpart possibly 3 feet to my right also tokens a perceptual thought that is the terminus of a causal chain originating at the big bang, but both causal chains intersect at the hairy snake.
First, both me and my counterpart share a cortex, so it is still my cerebral cortex and not the snake that is the first intersecting link in my causal chain and that of my counterpart. If Fodor wants to claim that it is relevant that my counterpart has a different token cortex because there is no transworld identity then the same condition would apply to the hairy snake, so that should make no difference. Thus, it cannot be the nearest intersecting node in the causal chain that determines the referent of our perceptual thought if we are talking about me and my counterpart.
Second, if proximity of intersecting nodes is not relevant then I do not see how triangulation makes any difference. If me and my counterpart truly are perceiving the same hairy snake (or counterparts thereof) then the hairy snake we perceive should have all of the same causal antecedents in the actual world and in all nearby possible worlds.
So, how does triangulation make any difference to solve the ‘Which Link?’ problem?
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