ABSTRACT
Computer scientists working in 'artificial intelligence', and cognitive psychologists thinking about reference, semantic representation, language use, and so on, have a little more specific hypothesis in mind than the almost empty hypothesis that the mind can be modelled by a digital computer. This chapter shows that it may be possible to give a complete functionalist psychology, including a complete verificationist semantics for mentalese, without in any way solving the problem of interpretation, or even the problem of reference-preserving translation. Davidson should have spelled out a little more explicitly, there is no reason to think that the availability of a 'cerebroscope' which enabled to directly read off the subject's 'mentalese' could make things any better. Davidson's point is that what is true of public language is almost certainly going to be true of any 'mental representations' or salient neurological states which stand causally behind public language.
