JERRY FODOR: BETWEEN PRAGMATISM AND CARTESIANISM
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
As part of the task of explaining what are the concepts and what are the conditions of possession of these, Fodor intends to draw a strong dividing line between the Cartesian theories, with which he is represented, and the pragmatist theories. He presents his theory centered on the 'language of thought', defending a non-epistemic and atomic notion of concepts, according to which they have an extension and “modes of presentation” –MDP in a non-Fregean sense–, which help individualize them. The function that these MDPs fulfill is what I will analyze in this work, concluding that, without denying the differences, it is possible to draw a correspondence between the author's own Cartesian conception and the pragmatist approaches to concepts.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
References
Fodor, J. A. (1981). Representations: philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science. MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1999). Conceptos: donde la ciencia cognitiva se equivocó. Gedisa.
Fodor, J. A. (2004). Having concepts: a brief refutation of the twentieth century. Mind and Language, 19(1), 29–47.
Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2014). Concepts. En E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
Prinz, J. J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: concepts and their perceptual basis. MIT Press.