FODOR’S LECTURES NATURALIZING THE MINDWORLD INTERFACE 1

FODOR: Naturalizing the mind-world interface

The goal: to understand how it is possible to think/speak about the world (how concepts apply to the world.)

The usual view: this requires a theory of meaning and a theory of reference for mental representations.
What they are. Why they must be different.

meaning arises (somehow) from relations among concepts,
reference arises (somehow) from relations between concepts and things-in-the world.
meaning determines reference?
If this is true, we don't need a theory of reference after all. In fact, most psychologists have tacitly assumed that we don't. (Skinner was the exception).

if meaning is anything like what cog sci has had in mind, then it DOESN'T determine reference. (I will try v. hard to do this without talking about twins.)
Various other failures: it doesn't compose, etc.
If meaning is what cog sci has in mind, then we have no idea how to naturalize the theory of meaning. (Snear at various psychological attempts involving, eg. `similarity').

This will leave us with the question: What do we need a theory of meaning for? We think maybe you don't; maybe there is no such thing as meaning.

counterarguments from Frege. (Or, perhaps, delay this till the end of the semester.

(1) Focal attention

What is it for? Cut down information to match the human channel capacity?
Survey of some evidence concerning focal attention and inhibition and how both travel with the objects they are selecting.
Focal attention is needed for solving the correspondence problem which arises in apparent motion & stereo, and for incremental construction of a representation over time and across fixations.
The real reason for focal attention may be Strawson’s “Collecting Principle.” This requires solving the Binding Problem for many objects at once.
There is selection, but what is its basis? Mostly selection of “objects” or “things” rather than visible properties.

Major finding is that object selection sticks to same-objects as they move around and/or change other visual properties

(2) Where the idea of Indexes (FINSTs) came from initially and what we now believe

How can we construct a visual representation based on successive changing (or even continuously changing) views.
Why do we need (a) Multiple indexes and (b) indexes that are data-driven (exceptions…?) and (c) indexes that, while being connected to Object Files, do not use the content of such files for tracking. Review of many experiments –e.g., subitizing, subset selection, and MOT.
A survey of findings using MOT showing that it’s not done by a split attention beam. Data show that properties of the objects and their trajectories are not usually encoded. We do not individuate objects by simply applying focal attention – either serially or on parallel.