The Non-Cognitive Mind The so-called cognitive mind is said to be subject to the representational theory of mind (RTM).[1] This theory has a number of elements chief among which is that thoughts have compositional structure—roughly, their conceptual content mirrors the compositionality of language. That means that they have propositional content—the kind of content that sentences […]
Fodor’s RTM Here is a telling passage in Hume Variations written by my old friend and fellow mysterian Jerry Fodor: “For a number of interlocking reasons, it remains fully plausible that cognitive processes are constituted by causal interactions among mental representations, that is, among semantically evaluable particulars. Either that, or we really are entirely in […]
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 […]
