ABSTRACT
There is a passage in The Language of Thought in which Jerry Fodor criticizes James and Eleanor Gibson’s theory of perception. Richard Rorty discusses this dispute between Fodor and James and Eleanor Gibson in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Surprisingly, in retrospect, Rorty endorses Fodor’s position. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published at the peak of excitement of the newly established cognitive sciences, and it was important to Rorty that his critique of representational epistemology not run afoul of an exciting new scientific research program. Essentially, Rorty argues that representationalism in cognitive psychology is unrelated to representationalism in epistemology; the former is causal, the latter is normative. Rorty is correct that Fodor is intending only to present a psychological theory. However, the Gibsons, unlike Fodor, intend to give a theory that is both psychological and epistemological; their theory of perception is also a theory about how we come to know. For the Gibsons, when we ask how we know the world, the answer is that when we appropriately explore an information-rich environment, we are in direct epistemic contact with the world. Given this, there is no need for representationalist psychology, but also no need for representationalist epistemology. We will agree with Rorty that epistemology and psychology are separate enterprises, but we will argue that, despite their separation, psychological theories have deep epistemological implications. Given this, we will argue that Rorty, as a Deweyan and Heideggerian, should have taken the side of the Gibsons in their dispute with Fodor.
