The Mind as a Relational Structure
A Philosophical Study of Mind-Body Dualism as Relations in Jerry Fodor
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Beschreibung
One of the biggest challenges confronting philosophers in the study of philosophy of mind is the tension that exists between intentional realism and physicalism. This tension arises because it seems to many philosophers that intentional realism is incompatible with phyiscalism. Specifically, the question here is whether propositional attitude states like (believes, desires, fears, longing, yearning, loving, enjoying, etc.) all of which are properties of mental states, be physicalistically implementable and whether the causal laws of intentional psychology can be reduced to physical explanations. “This worry arises because causal psychological laws apparently relate to intentional states in ways that correlate with their rational relations.” This is Fodor’s dilemma and it is this difficulty that Fodor tried to reconcile with his Asymmetry Dependence Theory, through the process of the naturalization of the mental. The key argument of this project, is that the relative autonomy enjoyed by Fodor’s propositional attitude states from the physical states, which is grounded in Fodor’s notion of conceptual atomism, a situation that led to his denial of concept empiricism, will make the naturalization process difficult. For the theory of naturalization of the mental to be possible, we have to acknowledge the reality of concept learning in the formation and development of thought.
Autor*in
Cornelius Chinedu Chukwu