Granny's Campaign for Safe Science

Abstract

What is the thread tying together all of Jerry Fodor's vigorous and influential campaigns over the years? Consider the diversity of his btes noirs. In Chihara and Fodor, 1965, it was Wittgenstein and the "no private language" gang; in Psychological Explanation (1968) and The Language of Thought (1975), it was Ryle, Skinner and other behaviorists; in "Tom Swift and his Procedural Grandmother" (1978 reprinted in 1981) it was AI in general and procedural semantics in particular; in "Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes" (1979, reprinted with revisions in 1981) it was me and my "irrealist" way with stances; in "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Science" (1980 reprinted in 1981) it was the brand of "naturalism" that claimed that psychology had to traffic in meanings that were not inside the head; in The Modularity of Mind (1983) it was Bruner and the other New Look psychologists who infected perception with thought, but also, in the shocking punch line of the last chapter, AI again; in Psychosemantics (1987) it was the meaning holists and those who would ground their naturalistic appeal to teleological formulations in what Fodor elsewhere has called "vulgar Darwinism" (these villains take another drubbing in his forthcoming "A Theory of Content"); and in "Connectionism and Cognitive Architecure: a Critical Analysis", Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988, it is the connectionists and their many friends.