Fodor's LOT Foddered

[Veritas Aequitas]

Fodor's LOT Foddered to animals.

I was reading Paul Churchland's Plato Camera : How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals, and came across his critique of Fodor's LOT.
Churchland's basis is based on evidence from neurosciences.

Here is summary from ChatGPT;

Paul Churchland, a philosopher of mind and cognitive science, offered a critical analysis of Jerry Fodor's theory of the "Language of Thought" (LOT). Fodor's theory proposes that the mind uses a language-like symbolic system, akin to a mental language, to represent and process information. Here is a summary of Churchland's main critiques:

Lack of empirical support: Churchland argued that Fodor's theory of the Language of Thought lacked sufficient empirical evidence to back up its claims. He maintained that the theory relied heavily on introspection and lacked substantial support from cognitive neuroscience or psychological experiments.

Unexplained content: Fodor's theory posits that mental representations have inherent meanings or content. However, Churchland criticized this notion, asking how the mind can have meaningful symbols without a clear account of how they acquire their content or how they relate to external reality.

Innate structure: Fodor proposed that the Language of Thought is innate, meaning that it is hard-wired into the mind and is a product of evolutionary development. Churchland challenged this idea, as it seemed to make a strong assumption about the nature of the mind without providing compelling evidence for its innateness.

Lack of explanatory power: Churchland contended that Fodor's theory did not offer sufficient explanatory power for understanding complex cognitive processes, such as learning, creativity, and problem-solving. He believed that the LOT framework was too limited to provide a comprehensive account of human cognition.

Alternative models: Churchland presented alternative models of cognition, such as connectionism (neural network-based approaches), which he believed offered more promising accounts of how the mind processes information and learns from experience. He argued that these models could better accommodate the flexibility and adaptability observed in human cognition.

Overall, Churchland's critique of Fodor's Language of Thought theory centered on the lack of empirical support, unexplained content, assumptions of innateness, and limited explanatory power. He advocated for more empirically grounded and flexible models of cognition that could better account for the complexities of human thinking and behavior.

[Flannel Jesus]

ChatGPT

[Iwannaplato]

As usual from VA we get a declaration of complete victory (for a position he supports)

Fodor's LOT Foddered to animals

A nice play on words, especially for a non-native!!
But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy to think that if someone presents a critique of a position, the whole thing is settled and Fodor's ideas are feed.

Since VA doesn't bother to actually make an argument himself....

Three examples (to be discussed in more detail in the following paragraphs) are his criticisms of nativists, his repudiation of the language of thought hypothesis, or "LOT" (championed by Fodor and others), and his critique of indicator semantics (of the sort defended by Dretske, Fodor, and others). Moreover, although Churchland has many insightful things to say in the final two chapters of the book about the question of scientific realism and the role of natural language and cultural institutions in shaping some aspects of human cognition, it remains far from clear that adherence to anything resembling his neurally-inspired story is needed for one to say those things. The result is a deeply unsatisfying book. Churchland has missed an opportunity to show us, not only that his neural state-space account is actually inconsistent with nativism and LOT theories, but also that it has genuine advantages that opposing views cannot accommodate.

The state-space theory of the most basic level of representation in the brain is by no means implausible. Indeed, the idea of distributed-representation neural networks is very popular in cognitive science. But there is nothing in such an account itself to exclude a significant role for innateness. Churchland is resolute in opposing any such role, however, citing the small number of genes contained in the human genome when compared with the astronomical number of neural connections. But no actual nativist thinks that individual neural connections are directly coded for in the genome. Rather, all believe that innate systems result from interactions between genes, developmental variables, and environmental influences. To a first approximation, the minimal commitment of nativists in cognitive science is that some features of our neural and cognitive systems are acquired or develop without learning, rather than that they are directly coded in the genes (Carruthers et al., 2005, 2006, 2007).

Churchland makes no attempt to engage with the actual views of real nativists, nor with the sorts of empirical data that motivate their views. For example, we now know that face processing in both humans and macaque monkeys is undertaken in an intricately interconnected set of six cortical regions, which appear to be homologous across the two species (Moeller et al., 2008; Tsao et al., 2008). We also know that both human and monkey infants have the capacity to distinguish between faces and non-faces (such as scrambled facial components) at birth (Farroni et al., 2005). Moreover, monkeys who have never had any exposure to faces at all (who were raised by humans wearing opaque gauze masks over their heads) nevertheless show capacities for fine-grained discrimination among both human and monkey faces that are close to normal (Sugita, 2008).

What such data suggest is that primates possess an innately channeled domain-specific learning mechanism specialized for faces, which can perform at least some aspects of its function without learning. Moreover, there is extensive evidence supporting the existence of many such mechanisms in humans and other animals. Many animals can walk from birth, for example, and are already capable of representing a good deal about the spatial and causal structure of the world around them. That the same seems not to be true of human infants may result more from the highly altricial nature of human infancy -- since the heads of human infants would otherwise be too large to travel down the birth canal -- rather than from the absence of innate learning mechanisms. Indeed, views of this sort are defended by those who have used looking-time methods to reveal the existence of a number of different bodies of so-called "core knowledge" in human infants (Spelke and Kinzler, 2007).

In addition, Churchland makes no mention of the many instances of one-shot learning that are known to exist in the animal kingdom, although he himself emphasizes the slow pace of connectionist and Hebbian learning. For example, a bee needs to observe the dance of a compatriot just once to know the direction and distance of a nectar source, and a baboon can come to know the new rank-ordering of families and individuals in the troupe from overhearing a single agonistic exchange that concludes with a rank-reversing fear scream (Cheney and Seyfarth, 2007). It may be that such findings can be explained in connectionist or Hebbian terms, but Churchland does not attempt to tell us how.

Failure to engage with his actual opponents is equally characteristic of Churchland's discussion of LOT theories. He writes disparagingly of such accounts:

Encouraged further by the structure of our own dearly beloved Folk Psychology, [supporters of LOT] have wrongly read back into the objective phenomenon of cognition-in-general a historically accidental structure that is idiosyncratic to a single species of animal (namely, humans), and which is of profoundly secondary importance even there (p.5).

Such a claim deeply misunderstands the LOT hypothesis, however. For an appeal to folk psychology is entirely inessential to the motivation for LOT theories, and the claim that such theories try to understand the representational structure of the mind by analogy to human public language is patently false in the case of Fodor (who is, of course, the archetypal LOT theorist).

Furthermore, LOT theories do not claim that "sentences" in the language of thought are: "just hidden, inward versions of the linguistic representations and activities so characteristic of cognitive activity at the third level [the level of explicit reasoning and communication in natural language sentences, discussed in Chapter 5]" (p.26), a view that Churchland attributes to Fodor (1975). On the contrary, LOT representations are held by Fodor to be language-like only in the sense that they have a combinatorial syntax and semantics and meet the conditions of systematicity and compositionality (Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988). Mental representations, on a LOT account, are built up out of representational components in such a way that these components make systematic contributions to the representational properties of the complexes in which they are embedded. It is of course true that human language is compositional and systematic. But LOT is not the claim that we have an internal representational system that is merely an internal version of an external, public, language. Nor does anyone believe that LOT is distinctively human, as Churchland claims. On the contrary, many of the kinds of data that are thought to support it derive from the study of nonhuman animals (Gallistel, 1990; Gallistel and King, 2009).

Ironically, Churchland's own account needs to be heavily supplemented to explain the full range of human and animal cognition, and the most obvious supplementation available would introduce LOT representations (properly understood, as above) into the story. Churchland contrasts the conceptual frameworks that result slowly from learning, and reflect the fixed causal structure of the environment, with ephemeral activations within those networks that locate the organism in the here and now, enabling it to know what to expect next or how to effect changes in that environment. But there is a huge space of forms of representation of the environment that is missing from this dichotomy, including both semantic and episodic forms of memory. It is surprising that Churchland could write the entire book without discussing any such examples.

The state-space structures that are thought to be built slowly by Hebbian learning correspond most closely to what would normally be described as implicit forms of knowledge. Our knowledge of the ways in which faces vary from one another is mostly implicit and inarticulable, for example. (Indeed, nativists could plausibly appropriate the state-space idea to characterize the internal processing structures of the learning mechanisms that they postulate.) This is the "landscape of abstract universals" described by the book's subtitle. And then online activity of specific regions in these state-spaces represents the here-and-now, such as the face of a specific individual person whom one is now seeing. Yet humans and other animals possess many forms of knowledge that fall into neither of these categories, since they require interactions between neural maps. Moreover, these are forms of knowledge that cannot be assimilated to learning at Churchland's second level (roughly, reasoning by analogy) nor at the third (where natural-language sentences play an important role).

Consider episodic memory, for example. Such memories are not regions in any one state-space. Rather, they seem to involve the creation of long-term linkages between regions of many different state-spaces, corresponding to the various sensory components of the original experience, in such a way that activations of any one are likely to cause activations of the others. If one recalls an episode of three red tomatoes falling on one's kitchen floor and smashing, for example, then this would seem to require a long-term link between the region of color state-space that represents red and the region of fruit-and-vegetable-space that represents tomatoes, together with the region representing a numerosity of three and the region of location-space that corresponds to one's kitchen. Indeed, it is in just such terms that the formation of episodic memory is characterized by many cognitive scientists (Tulving, 2002). But notice that the resulting structure is discrete and distinct from most other episodic memories. It is also compositionally structured out of the state-space regions that represent the various components of the original event.

Something similar will surely be true of many forms of semantic (or "factual") memory. Consider what takes place when one happens to run into a colleague while out walking the dog, and she points out the house where she lives nearby. The resulting knowledge is not comfortably assimilated to knowledge of the enduring causal structure of the world represented by state-spaces themselves. (Nor is the knowledge analogical in nature or natural-language-based.) Rather, it would seem to require building a link from the regions of various state-spaces (e.g. of the face-recognition system) that represent one's colleague to the region of spatial state-space that corresponds to the location of her home. And this, too, will be a compositionally structured discrete representation: a sentence in the language of thought, no less!

One place where there might seem to be a clear contrast with opposing views is on the topic of representational content. Here Churchland defends an updated version of his state-space semantics and contrasts it with "indicator" views such as the well-known positions of Dretske (1988) and Fodor (1990). But again Churchland deals less than sympathetically with his opponents. For example, he objects against Fodor that there are no laws of nature linking such worldly items as socks with any given state of the brain (p.95). But this is probably to take Fodor's words more strictly than intended. All Fodor need really be committed to is the existence of a reliable causal connection between the two that satisfies his famous "asymmetric dependence" requirement. For he is quite explicit that many other causal processes, many of which might involve representations, can factor into the causal processes that determine a symbol's content (Fodor, 1990, p.110). The crucial point is that the contents of these other symbols do not contribute to the content of the symbol in question.

In contrasting state-space semantics with indicator semantics Churchland advances the principle, "No representation without at least some comprehension" (p.96). Here the contrast with Fodor's views is fair, since the latter has always defended a resolutely atomistic account of content. But it overlooks the fact that many theorists who endorse some or other version of indicator semantics think that it forms just one factor in a two-factor account of semantic content, the other factor being some form of what Millikan (1984) calls "consumer semantics", such as her own teleosemantics or a version of inferential-role semantics (Block, 1986). And such theorists, for all Churchland has said, might happily adopt his account of state-space semantics as providing a story about the vehicles of content, and also an account of how the relevant form of teleological or inferential role is fixed.

A final striking fact about Churchland's book is that it seems almost wholly divorced from empirical psychology. Remarkably, indeed, in a book that advances a theory of the mind that is supposed to be empirically supported, Churchland provides only around thirty scientific references, just a third of which date from the twenty-first century, and many of which are computational rather than experimental in nature. One would like to think that he chose to provide only a judicious selection so as not to overwhelm his audience with references. But since he ignores a great many results that appear inconsistent with his main theses, we fear that the paucity of references requires a different explanation. Indeed, Churchland ignores almost entirely the extensive work in developmental and experimental psychology, in neuroscience, and in studies of comparative cognition that have been conducted by cognitive scientists, especially over the last twenty years. And it is precisely once we examine the theories supported by empirical phenomena of these psychological sorts that past and present arguments for nativism and for LOT (appropriately understood) begin to emerge.

[Iwannaplato]

ChatGPT

No, you don't understand: if you can find a philosopher who (seems to) agree with your position and get Chatgpt to spit out a short essay describing that philosopher's critique, then the issue is settled in your favor.

Fodor is proven wrong, his ideas are animal feed as stated in those few words that are VA's own. Demonstrated, Proven. Over. And a new thread for future links where VA can solidly claim he has stated and demonstraed that Fodor's ideas are wrong.

And the great thing in one need not even understand either what one is criticizing nor what one is using as critique.

It's a revolution in philosophy: take out the middlepersons.

Thinking by proxy.

[Iwannaplato]

And Churchland considers himself a scientific realist.

[Flannel Jesus]

Until chat gpt no longer has problems with hallucinating, I don't care what it has to say about any historical philosophers beliefs or arguments. I'm not sure I'm too concerned about the fact that historical people believed or argued certain things for most philosophical issues in the first place. I want to hear the argument itself, I don't want to hear "Kant believed such and such". So what if Kant believed that? Other people disagreed, so what's the actual argument?

[Iwannaplato]

Now I know who Churchland is. He's part of the husbandwife team. Ironically he's quite a bit like Peter Holme's in his eliminative materialist. Strange bedfellows indeed - VA and Churchlands, not the Churchlands: one would hope they are not strange bedfellows and don't seem to be philosophically.
And then Kant has his issues with materialism, given that it works away from things in themselves to dissolve the idea of mind.

[Iwannaplato]

Until chat gpt no longer has problems with hallucinating, I don't care what it has to say about any historical philosophers beliefs or arguments. I'm not sure I'm too concerned about the fact that historical people believed or argued certain things for most philosophical issues in the first place. I want to hear the argument itself, I don't want to hear "Kant believed such and such". So what if Kant believed that? Other people disagreed, so what's the actual argument?

Yes. If VA can manage to put Churchland's ideas into his own words are argue that position, peachy.
Or, if he wants to present Churchland's position for consideration, peachy.
But the declaring victory is just plain silly appeal to authority stuff.
And Churchland fits poorly with VA's ideas in general, so he's an odd authority for VA to appeal to.

[FlashDangerpants]

Churchland's basis is based on evidence from neurosciences.

If you had ever actually read Fodor you would know what a stupid thing that is to write.

[FlashDangerpants]

Since VA doesn't bother to actually make an argument himself....

...
In contrasting state-space semantics with indicator semantics Churchland advances the principle, "No representation without at least some comprehension" (p.96). Here the contrast with Fodor's views is fair, since the latter has always defended a resolutely atomistic account of content. But it overlooks the fact that many theorists who endorse some or other version of indicator semantics think that it forms just one factor in a two-factor account of semantic content, the other factor being some form of what Millikan (1984) calls "consumer semantics", such as her own teleosemantics or a version of inferential-role semantics (Block, 1986). And such theorists, for all Churchland has said, might happily adopt his account of state-space semantics as providing a story about the vehicles of content, and also an account of how the relevant form of teleological or inferential role is fixed.

Churchland gets a bit of a brutalising in that review, who wrote it?

Am I behind in some other conversation, what's got VA suddenly talking about mentalese?

Teleosemantics sounds weird but possibly cool, does anyone have an opinion on it? Building normativity directly into basic semantic content(?) seems like a fun way to troll Skepdick, or maybe fun for him to have trolling other people.

[Iwannaplato]

Churchland gets a bit of a brutalising in that review, who wrote it?

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/plato-s-cam ... niversals/

Am I behind in some other conversation, what's got VA suddenly talking about mentalese?

I think I know what he's after in the wider context, VA I mean. But since he's not doing any work I didn't even bother to try to figure it out. I'm happy to play dueling links and declare complete and total victory if that's the order of the day.

Teleosemantics sounds weird but possibly cool, does anyone have an opinion on it? Building normativity directly into basic semantic content(?) seems like a fun way to troll Skepdick, or maybe fun for him to have trolling other people.

I read a few different articles on teleosemantics, for example this one....
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/d ... TEXT01.pdf
I have to say I am missing something in the back and forth about errors. Yes, we mistakenly see something sometimes. Whatever the positive for the organism aspects of a specific representation in terms of natural selection, it still works enough of the time. Representations cannot be endlessly specific to avoid all errors. Does this mean they don't represent things? I think for me as a kind of pragmatists, I'm not so concerned on freezing the representation in the mind, thinking of it as a photo or a map or a model, but rather focus on what it does. What does this representation lead to us doing or experiencing?

Something else that makes me think I am missing something is that it has that teleo root in the name but much of the theory is looking at representations in terms of the effects of natural selection, rather than as teleological'.

[Veritas Aequitas]

As usual from VA we get a declaration of complete victory (for a position he supports)

Fodor's LOT Foddered to animals

A nice play on words, especially for a non-native!!
But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy to think that if someone presents a critique of a position, the whole thing is settled and Fodor's ideas are feed.

Since VA doesn't bother to actually make an argument himself....

Three examples (to be discussed in more detail in the following paragraphs) are his criticisms of nativists, his repudiation of the language of thought hypothesis, or "LOT" (championed by Fodor and others), and his critique of indicator semantics (of the sort defended by Dretske, Fodor, and others).

Thanks for the counter from ??.
Reference and link?
OK noted the above is from,
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/plato-s-cam ... niversals/
Reviewed by Peter Carruthers and J. Brendan Ritchie, University of Maryland

Currently there are different camps supporting Fodor's LOT and those who oppose it.
So the more the merrier, give me all the related links, there could be something worthwhile.

It would be interesting to note what is P Churchland's counter to the above.
It is criticism is serious enough, I am sure Churchland will offer a counter.

The spirit of philosophy is the discussions and debates.

The above sort of condemnations by various posters are only a killer to philosophy.

Those who are ultra anti-ChatGPT are unintelligence and unwise in relation to the AI issue.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Criticisms of LOT,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lang ... /#ConnChal

Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument has spawned a massive literature, including too many rebuttals to survey here. The most popular responses fall into five categories:

Deny (i). Some connectionists deny that cognitive science should posit representational mental states. They believe that mature scientific theorizing about the mind will delineate connectionist models specified in non-representational terms (P.S. Churchland 1986; P.S. Churchland & Sejnowski 1989; P.M. Churchland 1990; P.M. Churchland & P.S. Churchland 1990; Ramsey 2007). If so, then Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument falters at its first step. There is no need to explain why representational mental states are systematic and productive if one rejects all talk about representational mental states.

Accept (viii). Some authors, such as Marcus (2001), feel that neural networks are best deployed to illuminate the implementation of Turing-style models, rather than as replacements for Turing-style models.

Deny (ii). Some authors claim that Fodor and Pylyshyn greatly exaggerate the extent to which thought is productive (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986) or systematic (Dennett 1991; Johnson 2004). Horgan and Tienson (1996: 91–94) question the systematicity of thinking. They contend that we deviate from norms of deductive inference more than one would expect if we were following the rigid mechanical rules postulated by CCTM.

Deny (iv). Braddon-Mitchell and Fitzpatrick (1990) offer an evolutionary explanation for the systematicity of thought, bypassing any appeal to structured mental representations. In a similar vein, Horgan and Tienson (1996: 90) seek to explain systematicity by emphasizing how our survival depends upon our ability to keep track of objects in the environment and their ever-changing properties. Clark (1991) argues that systematicity follows from the holistic nature of thought ascription.

Deny (vi). Chalmers (1990, 1993), Smolensky (1991), and van Gelder (1991) claim that one can reject Turing-style models while still postulating mental representations with compositionally and computationally relevant internal structure.

We focus here on (vi).

[Iwannaplato]

Currently there are different camps supporting Fodor's LOT and those who oppose it.

Yes, that was one point I was making. I am not sure why you are telling me this. That's obvious from what I quoted in my first post.

So the more the merrier, give me all the related links, there could be something worthwhile.

You have the link, that gives the names of philosophers. You can also look at
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
where different sides are presented.
You can also google criticisms of Churchland or LOT hypothesis fodor (or other names of supporters of that position).

It would be interesting to note what is P Churchland's counter to the above.
It is criticism is serious enough, I am sure Churchland will offer a counter.

The spirit of philosophy is the discussions and debates.

The above sort of condemnations by various posters are only a killer to philosophy.

Did you not read what I wrote? It seems not.
Let me repeat the part of my post that I wrote. See if you can be respectful and try to understand it this time. I will help with a paraphrase after.....

As usual from VA we get a declaration of complete victory (for a position he supports)
Fodor's LOT Foddered to animals
A nice play on words, especially for a non-native!!
But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy to think that if someone presents a critique of a position, the whole thing is settled and Fodor's ideas are feed.

Notice how my focus was on your celebration of complete victory. Do you see that? The title of the thread via metaphor is asserting that Churchland has destroyed Foder's version of LOT.

For me to point out that your framing the issue as closed and over is not a killer to philosophy.

If you had started the thread with the same ChatGPT rendering of Churchland's points, I would not have said any of the above.

If you are interested in the spirit of debates, as you claim above, then why not drop these declarations of victory and proof, when it is obvious that the philosophical situation is more complicated to that. And it*s not the first time you have done this. You find someone who (you think at least) supporsts one of your positions or attacks PH's position. Then in the title or opening of your thread you, in one way or another, declare the issue closed. The person in the link has destroyed the position you are critical of.

THAT is not in the spirit of discussion. That is in the spirit of 'see, the issue is over and if you don't get that you are ignorant, barbaric, etc.'

That's the spirit you have shown in many of your threads. There position X is destroyed.

That's what I criticized in the post you have quoted above.

Since VA doesn't bother to actually make an argument himself....

Those who are ultra anti-ChatGPT are unintelligence and unwise in relation to the AI issue.

Let me help you here. That sentence does not condemn the use of ChatGPT. You'll see that I don't mention AI there at all. What I meant was 'since VA does not present an argument, but rather simply quotes external opinions and sources

THAT'S WHAT I'M GOING TO DO ALSO.

So, you presented an AI summation of Churchland's critique of Fodor's LOT
and
I presented an review of a book that critiques Churchland's positions.

IOW to show that there is a complicate debate happening on the issue and Fodor's LOt is not animal feed. Perhaps it will be sometime in the future, but I was arguing through a proxy, just like you were, that the issue is not dead, and even that Churchland faces some of the same criticisms he aims at Fodor.

I don't think what I quoted destroys Churchland.

I notice that you 1) did not respond to the criticism of you framing the issue as now closed: Fodor's ideas, in your mind, are now animal feed; and 2) did not respond to the criticisms of Churchland's position in what I quoted. You didn't respond, nor did you get Chatgpt to respond.

All you did was accuse me of positions I do not have and request more links.

There was plenty of stuff in what I already quoted. And I am sure you are right that Churchland will or already has responded to these criticisms.

I see a pattern in you which is to appeal to authority. The declaring the positions you oppose is part of that habit. Your linking to your own threads where issues have not been resolved - an appeal to your own authority - and the way you use links and quotes by others AND how you use Chatgpt seems like a part of that.

HOW you use Chapgpt
not
THAT you use Chatgpt

Other people do this....
their OPs have just a link top a video or article. It's considered bad form in many forums. And generally in philosophy forums people are expected to be able to present ideas in their own words - you do this also in many threads. But generally in a philosophy forum people don't present someone else's work AND frame this as having destroyed other positions. And that is not in the spirit of philosophy you suddenly seem to be advocating for.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Currently there are different camps supporting Fodor's LOT and those who oppose it.

Yes, that was one point I was making. I am not sure why you are telling me this. That's obvious from what I quoted in my first post.

So the more the merrier, give me all the related links, there could be something worthwhile.

You have the link, that gives the names of philosophers. You can also look at
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/
where different sides are presented.
You can also google criticisms of Churchland or LOT hypothesis fodor (or other names of supporters of that position).

It would be interesting to note what is P Churchland's counter to the above.
It is criticism is serious enough, I am sure Churchland will offer a counter.

The spirit of philosophy is the discussions and debates.

The above sort of condemnations by various posters are only a killer to philosophy.

Did you not read what I wrote? It seems not.
Let me repeat the part of my post that I wrote. See if you can be respectful and try to understand it this time. I will help with a paraphrase after.....

As usual from VA we get a declaration of complete victory (for a position he supports)
Fodor's LOT Foddered to animals
A nice play on words, especially for a non-native!!
But it's a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy to think that if someone presents a critique of a position, the whole thing is settled and Fodor's ideas are feed.

Notice how my focus was on your celebration of complete victory. Do you see that? The title of the thread via metaphor is asserting that Churchland has destroyed Foder's version of LOT.

For me to point out that your framing the issue as closed and over is not a killer to philosophy.

If you had started the thread with the same ChatGPT rendering of Churchland's points, I would not have said any of the above.

If you are interested in the spirit of debates, as you claim above, then why not drop these declarations of victory and proof, when it is obvious that the philosophical situation is more complicated to that. And it*s not the first time you have done this. You find someone who (you think at least) supporsts one of your positions or attacks PH's position. Then in the title or opening of your thread you, in one way or another, declare the issue closed. The person in the link has destroyed the position you are critical of.

THAT is not in the spirit of discussion. That is in the spirit of 'see, the issue is over and if you don't get that you are ignorant, barbaric, etc.'

I did not claim any complete victory [yeah I win .. I win] by merely throwing in Churchland's views.
That was never my intention.
I am aware the topic re LOT is heavily debated.
Often I will end my OP with "Views??" which I had omitted in this one.

The OP was meant to throw a 'stinger' [ - borrow fm FJ] to those [PH and his likes] who insist 'language is king'.

It is up to them to give their counters or whatever.