ABSTRACT
Philosophy.—Contemporary cognitive psychologists frequently attribute to people representational states that do not seem to interact in the usual ways with other typical mental states such as beliefs and desires (→BELIEF, DESIRE, REPRESENTATION). To take a notorious example, Chomskyian linguists often attribute to people “knowledge”of elaborate grammatical rules of which they are unaware and which do not combine with other beliefs they might possess at the same time (→CONSCIOUSNESS, GRAMMAR). Chomsky himself might have been born “knowing” grammatical rule R, and as a linguist, he might believe that if R then P (where P is some particular claim about a language); but he might not be the least bit inclined to conclude that P-indeed, he may for some time have explicitly denied both R and P. Steven Stich calls such relatively isolated cognitive states subdoxastic (subbelief) states: they are contentful states that do not enter into standard inferential patterns with other relevant beliefs (→REASONING AND RATIONALITY). They are, in Jerry Fodor’s terms, informationally encapsulated (→INFORMATION, MODULARITY). Since the precise degree of encapsulation varies in different cases (for example, in early vision, natural language syntax, semantics; →DOMAIN SPECIFICITY, LANGUAGE, PERCEPTION, SEMANTICS, SYNTAX), there is considerable controversy about whether they correspond to the states of Fodor’s modules, to Chomsky’s (1976) cognized states, or to what still others have called merely tacit or unconscious knowledge.
