Chapter Eleven— Intentionality Without Vindication, Psychology Without Naturalization
1. This view is probably not universal, but it is widely held. I asked Fodor about this explicitly at a conference at the State University of New York, Buf- soft
falo, in 1992, and he said that he would give up intentional realism if it were incompatible with materialism. On the other hand, Dretske said at a conference at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1994 that he would give up materialism under the same conditions. [BACK]
2. Part of the qualification that it provides only "one of" the first chances stems from the fact that the mathematical machinery involved in neural network approaches was growing apace with "orthodox" computation. [BACK]
3. The main reason I think such a model would have to be extremely complex is that in cognition there seem almost always to be many mutually dependent variables. If we are dealing at the level of intentional psychology, one's decisions are made against an enormous background of tacit assumptions and beliefs and desires that may never emerge as occurrent judgments and wishes. If we are dealing at the level of, say, perceptual modeling, the various parts of the brain that are implicated in perceptual processing are highly interconnected, and seem to exhibit significant feed-forward and feed-back relations. To get even a minimally decent model that duplicates, say, visual performance with respect to subjective contour features, you need models of several individual modules with very particular architectures, as well as a model of how they interrelate. There seem to be more levels of complexity and interaction here than in, say, the way thermodynamic phenomena are related to statistical calculations over mechanical interactions of gas particles. [BACK]
4. Indeed, it occurs to me that I can rightly be said to "have $10,000" even if I possess no currency. Much of our "possession" of money is realized through representations in bank computers. My having some sum of money "in the bank'' is realized through a particular binary pattern being instantiated in my bank's computer! [BACK]
5. While these views are loosely inspired by Quine, I should be careful in how I attributed any of them to him personally. Quine is a subtle man. [BACK]
6. Macintyre (1967). [BACK]
7. In actual practice, of course, there will be trade-offs in both directions. Even if the Ptolemaic system had perfect predictive success and a viable model of how the celestial spheres behaved, the inelegance of the hodgepodge of epicycles might lead one to doubt the truth of the theory. [BACK]