Any Online Lectures by Jerry Fodor on Conceptual Atomism

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

Moderators: AMod, iMod

Post Reply
lukasecho
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2014 11:42 am

Any Online Lectures by Jerry Fodor on Conceptual Atomism

Post by lukasecho »

Hey whats the deal with Conceptual Atomism

I have been doing a survey of the various theories of the Concept and have just run across this Conceptual Atomism one - and can't find much on it. Is it really quite new?

SEP says:
2.4 Conceptual atomism
A radical alternative to all of the theories we've mentioned so far is conceptual atomism, the view that lexical concepts have no semantic structure (Fodor 1998, Millikan 2000). According to conceptual atomism, the content of a concept isn't determined by its relation to other concepts but by its relation to the world.

Conceptual atomism follows in the anti-descriptivist tradition that traces back to Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and others working in the philosophy of language (see Kripke 1972/80, Putnam 1975, Devitt 1981). Kripke, for example, argues that proper names function like mere tags in that they have no descriptive content (Kripke 1972/80). On a description theory one might suppose that “Gödel” means something like the discoverer of the incompleteness of arithmetic. But Kripke points out we could discover that Schmitt really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic and that Gödel could have killed Schmitt and passed the work off as his own. The point is that if the description theory were correct, we would be referring to Schmitt when we say “Gödel”. But intuitively that's not the case at all. In the imagined scenario, the sentence “Gödel discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic” is saying something false about Gödel, not something trivially true about the discoverer of the incompleteness of arithmetic, whoever that might be (though see Machery et al. 2004 on whether this intuition is universal). Kripke's alternative account of names is that they achieve their reference by standing in a causal relation to their referents. Conceptual atomism employs a similar strategy while extending the model to all sorts of concepts, not just ones for proper names.
lukasecho
Posts: 42
Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2014 11:42 am

Re: Any Online Lectures by Jerry Fodor on Conceptual Atomism

Post by lukasecho »

asymmetric causal theory of reference ?
Post Reply