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Jan 2000
ISBN 026256128X
229 pp.
1 illus.
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In Critical Condition
Jerry Fodor

"These wonderfully written and frequently profound essays represent Fodor at his critical, iconoclastic and humorous best -- and it's pretty hard to get much better than that."
-- Stephen Schiffer, Department of Philosophy, New York University

In this book Jerry Fodor contrasts his views about the mind with those of a number of well-known philosophers and cognitive scientists, including John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke, Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Paul Smolensky, and Richard Dawkins. Several of these essays are published here for the first time. The rest originated as book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, or in journals of philosophy or psychology. The topics examined include cognitive architecture, the nature of concepts, and the status of Darwinism in psychology. Fodor constructs a version of the Representational Theory of Mind that blends Intentional Realism, Computational Reductionism, Nativism, and Semantic Atomism.

Table of Contents
 Preface
I Metaphysics
1 Review of John McDowell's Mind and World
2 Special Sciences: Still Autonomous after All These Years (A Reply to Jaegwon Kim's "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction")
II Concepts
3 Review of Christopher Peacocke's A Study of Concepts
4 There Are No Recognitional Concepts -- Not Even RED
5 There Are No Recognitional Concepts -- Not Even RED, Part 2: The Plot Thickens
6 Do We Think in Mentalese? Remarks on Some Arguments of Peter Carruthers
7 Review of A. W. Moore's Points of View
III Cognitive Architecture
8 Review of Paul Churchland's The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul
9 Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity: Why Smolensky's Solution Doesn't Work
by Jerry Fodor and Biran McLaughlin
10 Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity (Continued): Why Smolensky's Solution Still Doesn't Work
11 There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity
12 Review of Jeff Elman et al., Rethinking Innateness
13 Review of Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind
IV Philosophical Darwinism
14 Review of Richard Dawkins's Climbing Mount Improbable
15 Deconstructing Dennett's Darwin
16 Is Science Biologically Possible? Comments on Some Arguments of Patricia Churchland and of Alvin Plantinga
17 Review of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works and Henry Plotkin's Evolution in Mind
 References
 Index
 
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