The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

(Paperback)

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"The Elm and the Expert" provides a discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege's problem, twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. The book extends and revises a view of the relation betwen mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book, "The Language of Thought". Among philosophers, a general consensus exists that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus. Fodor offers a theory sketch in which psychological explanation is intentional, psychological processes are computational, and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential.

Author Bio

Jerry A. Fodor is State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Mind Doesn't Work That Way- The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (MIT Press) and other books.