Eliminativní materialismus, lidová psychologie a jazyk myšlení

The article provides an analysis of Paul and Patricia Churchland’s eliminative materialism. I will distinguish two lines of argument in their eliminativism: one seeking to eliminate folk psychology and the second criticising Jerry Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis. Then I will closely examine the second line of argument, and show that it represents the main motive of Churchland’s work since the end of 1980s and demonstrate why the success of the argument against the language of thought hypothesis does not constitute a reason for the elimination of folk psychology. Finally, I will examine the consequences of this approach for the role of folk psychology in the study of mind and show that the weakened eliminativist position still fulfils the original aim of Churchland’s program.

Concepts and Compositionality: In Search of the Brain's Language of Thought

Imagine Genghis Khan, Aretha Franklin, and the Cleveland Cavaliers performing an opera on Maui. This silly sentence makes a serious point: As humans, we can flexibly generate and comprehend an unbounded number of complex ideas. Little is known, however, about how our brains accomplish this. Here we assemble clues from disparate areas of cognitive neuroscience, integrating recent research on language, memory, episodic simulation, and computational models of high-level cognition. Our review is framed by Fodor's classic language of thought hypothesis, according to which our minds employ an amodal, language-like system for combining and recombining simple concepts to form more complex thoughts. Here, we highlight emerging work on combinatorial processes in the brain and consider this work's relation to the language of thought. We review evidence for distinct, but complementary, contributions of map-like representations in subregions of the default mode network and sentence-like representations of conceptual relations in regions of the temporal and prefrontal cortex.

Introduction

It is patent that the so-called cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was the result of ideas emerging at the confluence of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience—what became known as cognitive science. In the last 60 years or so, Jerry Fodor has been one of the most important exponents of this revolution. He has advanced key ideas on the foundations of cognitive science, in particular on the nature of mental representation and on mental processes seen as computations over symbols. Many of his contributions have been the subject of deep divides and have generated classical controversies. The chapter provides a rough guide to Fodor’s contributions to psycholinguistics, to the modularity of mind, to atomism as a theory of conceptual representation, to the language of thought hypothesis, and to cognitive architecture more broadly—topics that figure prominently in the present book.

The Neurobiological Bases for the Computational Theory of Mind

The language of thought hypothesis is one of Fodor’s seminal contributions to cognitive science. Prominent among the objections to it has been the argument that there is no neurobiological evidence for materially realized symbols in the brain. If memory is materially realized by enduring alterations in synaptic conductances, then this is true, because the synaptic-conductance hypothesis is simply the ancient associative learning hypothesis couched in neurobiological language. Associations are not symbols and cannot readily be made to function as such, thus neurobiologists are unable to say how simple information—for example, the durations of intervals in simple Pavlovian conditioning paradigms—are stored in altered synaptic conductances. Recent results from several laboratories converge, strongly suggesting that memories do not reside in altered synaptic conductances but rather at the molecular level inside neurons. The chapter reviews the experimental evidence for this revolutionary conclusion, as well as the plausibility arguments for it.

The acquired language of thought hypothesis

I present the symbol grounding problem in the larger context of a materialist theory of content and then present two problems for causal, teleo-functional accounts of content. This leads to a distinction between two kinds of mental representations: presentations and symbols; only the latter are cognitive. Based on Milner and Goodale’s dual route model of vision, I posit the existence of precise interfaces between cognitive systems that are activated during object recognition. Interfaces are constructed as a child learns, and is taught, how to interact with its environment; hence, interface structure has a social determinant essential for symbol grounding. Symbols are encoded in the brain to exploit these interfaces, by having projections to the interfaces that are activated by what they symbolise. I conclude by situating my proposal in the context of Harnad’s (1990) solution to the symbol grounding problem and responding to three standard objections.