Where is my mind? - The Diigo Meta page

• 12 Apr 09
  

  jerry_fodor reviews:books andy_clark LRB extended_mind_thesis

• 11 Feb 09
  

  clarify

  cognition mind philosophy world jerryfodor fodor content tools

• 06 Feb 09
  

  Rudy Garns

  There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You’ll regret it if you don’t. (Jerry Fodor review of Clark)

  mind extended-mind clark fodor cogsci

  • Is what my robot does when it ‘decides’ to change course a sort of thing which if it had happened inside the robot, ‘I would have had no hesitation in accepting as part of [a] cognitive process?’
  • But how am I to understand the hypothesis that it would (or wouldn’t) have changed course if it had collided with the couch in my head?
  • His real argument is that, barring a principled reason for distinguishing between what Otto keeps in his notebook and what Inga keeps in her head, there’s a slippery slope from the one to the other.
  • The mark of the mental is its intensionality (with an ‘s’); that’s to say that mental states have content; they are typically about things.
  • What I should have said isn’t that only what’s literally and unmetaphorically mental has content, but that if something literally and unmetaphorically has content, then either it is mental (part of a mind) or the content is ‘derived’ from something that is mental. ‘Underived’ content (to borrow John Searle’s term) is the mark of the mental; underived content is what minds and only minds have.
  • Externalism needs internalism; but not vice versa. External representation is a side-show; internal representation is ineliminably the main event.
  • your internal model of the world contains stuff that the world itself does not; this happens not just when your beliefs are false but also when they are hypothetical (‘if there are clouds, there will be rain’ can be true even if there aren’t any clouds); or when they are modal (‘it might rain’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain); or when they are in the past or future tense (‘it used to rain here a lot’ can be true even if it doesn’t rain here anymore).

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