A Fortiori
A Fortiori
I noticed with mounting irritation that Jerry Fodor keeps using the Latin phrase “a fortiori” to mean “it follows that” in Hume Variations. It doesn’t mean that; it means “with stronger reason” (look it up). The correct construction is “it follows a fortiori that p”. You can’t say “a fortiori a fortiori”—as if that meant “it follows with stronger reason”. Moreover, no one ever corrected him, including copy-editors. Does no one know what “a fortiori” means? It reminds me of people who use the phrase “craven cowards”: “craven” means “cowardly”. These are not difficult points. We all make mistakes, but really come on.
It must be a daunting task for a mere proof reader to correct a big professor on a technical term
Am I going to tell Jimi Hendrix he’s not playing a particular key correctly?
That’s not it–I’ve had many corrections from proof-readers, some of them actually correct! People just don’t know what unusual words mean.
“Close proximity” is like “craven cowards.” And why do people say, “I want to thank so-and-so” instead of just thanking so-and-so?
And what about “small little”?
And neither “legendary” nor “iconic” means “famous,” as they are used to refer to celebrities.
The word “iconic” is now overused to the point of imbecility, as is “unprecedented”.
Perhaps I should stop complaining about this one, because it has become ubiquitous, but “issues” does not mean “problems.” “I called the dentist because I have issues with my teeth” sounds ridiculous.
What shocked me was Jerry Fodor repeatedly making this error with “a fortiori” and no one noticing it! I’ve never seen this mistake before in any other academic writer.
If I recall correctly, he was very high up or right on the top of the list of philosophers you wrote about once. (Maybe second to yourself.)
So maybe there are different aspects or measures of greatness and terminological accuracy is necessarily one of them.
That’s what shocked me–he is way up there but gets easy things wrong. I remember he was shaky about the spelling of “lose”, spelling it “loose”.
As we have noted not long ago here, Fodor became loose with argumentation in his later period. He did not defend his claims much and quite viciously attacked opponents without much substance. I have not read his Hume Variations but its date of publication fits this “theory”. The additional aspect in your a fortiori posting is that he became sloppy with his vocabulary as well. Not surprising…
He had a rather “self-assured” personality that intimidated people. HV is a useful summation of his views and has good stuff in it. At least he was forthright.
Right. But I prefer Chomsky’s style of being forthright in philosophy of mind (not in his political philosophy!) which I believe you share — when it is a mystery and there is no reasonable explanation or a strong argument either way just say so. Mature and late Fodor never did that. Chomsky’s attitude beats eye rolling and cancellations of opponents with a bunch of dismissive and sometimes vulgar comments that are roughly analogous to “wink-wink people who REALLY understand — she/he is a complete idiot.” I don’t think that the Churchlands who frequently were on the receiving side of this nonsense were great philosophers. But their eliminative materialism arguments are not weaker than Fodor’s.
I wouldn’t lower Fodor that far, but to each his own. I think his best work is The Modularity of Mind. He was a strange man, both bully and softie.
Fodor’s largest philosophical error or sloppiness was to confuse the absence of evidence with evidence of absence. Here is a typical quote from his book with Pylyshyn from 2015 Minds without Meanings: “Connectionists… apparently want to opt simultaneously for the compositionality of mental representations and the associativity of the mental processes. But they have not … been at all clear about how they might manage to do so” p.158
Not to mention that intelligence (natural or AI) might not need the sacred by Fodorians “compositionality” at all as today’s LLMs clearly show to more open minded people.
Different minds might be multiply realized in their architecture.
“isn’t one of them”..
Need an edit function here..