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Coping with informational atomism - one of Jerry Fodor’s legacies
Title / Series / Name
Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
Publication Volume
11
Publication Issue
1
Pages
Authors
Editors
Keywords
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13680
Abstract
Fodor was passionately unwilling to compromise. Of his several commitments, I focus here on informational atomism. Fodor staunchly rejected semantic holism for two conspiring reasons. He took it to threaten his commitment to the nomic character of psychological explanation. He also took it to pave the way towards relativism, which he found deeply offensive. In this paper, I reconstruct the strands of Fodor’s commitment to the computational version of the representational theory of mind that led him to informational atomism. I take issue with three features of informational atomism. First, I argue that it deprives content from its expected causal role in psychological explanation. Secondly, I take issue with Fodor’s claim that only informational atomism can meet the requirements of the principle of compositionality. Finally, I argue that informational atomism yields a bloated or unwieldy category of nomic properties.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Bari
Type
Journal article
Date
2020
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
http://dx.doi.org/10.4453/rifp.2020.0002