ABSTRACT
In J. A. Fodor (Fodor 1975 and 1981) we have a new and very up-to-date champion of the representational theory of mind (RTM), the theory that an organism’s cognitive relations to the world are mediated by a system of mental representations. According to Fodor, Descartes and other seventeenthand eighteenth-century philosophers were essentially correct in their approach to understanding the mind; it was in the details of their mentalistic models and in their preoccupation with epistemological problems that they went wrong. Originally the RTM was adopted, not because of its plausibility as an explanatory theory in psychology but because it was able, prima facie, to meet the stringent demands of a foundationalist epistemology. On Fodor’s view, however, the RTM can be disassociated from epistemology (Fodor 1975: pp. 44-5) – as convincingly as Kepler’s laws can be separated from his fantastic views about the solar system. To salvage the laws in this way requires showing them to be part of a different and viable theory. In other words, Kepler’s laws are not self-evidently acceptable but are acceptable only insofar as they are grounded in a viable theoretical framework. Kepler’s mysticism about perfect geometric solids does not provide such a framework; Newtonian physics, on the other hand, does.
