Fodor on Mystery

Fodor on Mystery

This is Jerry Fodor in Hume Variations (2003): “Thinking, intentionality, concept possession, and concept individuation really are deeply mysterious, and they really can’t be allowed indefinitely to take in each other’s wash. The hardness of understanding intentionality and thought isn’t, these days, as widely advertised as the hardness of understanding consciousness, but it’s quite hard enough to be getting on with. And, with concepts as with consciousness, Cartesianism doesn’t crack the nut.” (22) I wish to make two points about this. First, the problem of concepts isn’t a problem definable in terms of what it’s like to have them; there isn’t anything it’s like in the way there is something it’s like to be in pain or see red. So, mysteries of the mind are not all mysteries of subjective quality. The problem with bat concepts isn’t that there is something it’s like to have them; it’s about how to analyze them. Second, Fodor seems to allow that concepts are not quite as hard as consciousness, which suggests degrees of hardness. Perhaps they can be partially understood in terms of causality or biological function, though not wholly. Would it be right to say that understanding one of them would help in understanding the other? Possibly. I do think the contemporary focus on consciousness is misplaced.[1]

[1] I note that the reference to cracking the nut must be an allusion to my metaphor of the “hard nut” of the mind-body problem in “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”.