How does Fodor defend functionalism?

Fodor adhered to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought. Fodor strongly opposed reductive accounts of the mind.

What does Dennett argue?

Dennett claims that our brains hold only a few salient details about the world, and that this is the only reason we are able to function at all. Dennett says that only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all: “To explain is to explain away”.

What theory proposed by Chomsky and Fodor argues that language and thought might be independent of each other?

Nativist (Fodor/Chomsky): Language is independent of thought, innate, have specific modules for language.

Which example does Fodor use to describe functionalism?

Fodor uses an analogy of a vending machine to explain the functionalist theory of mind. Vending machines are defined by the ways in which they return output (say, snacks) on the basis of their inputs (money and pushed buttons for selections).

How does functionalism solve the mind body problem?

Since functionalism recognizes that mental particulars may be physical, it is compatible with the idea that mental causation is a species of physical causation. In other words, functionalism tolerates the materialist solution to the mind-body problem provided by the central-state identity theory.

What does Dan Dennett believe?

Dennett is an atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement.

Does Dennett believe in free will?

Dennett is a compatibilist, meaning he subscribes to the belief that free will and determinism can coexist without being logically incoherent. For compatibilists, this means agents are morally responsible for their actions as long as those actions do not arise from external coercion.

What is Fodor’s and why is it important?

Jerry Fodor was one of the most important philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He defended a “Representational Theory of Mind,” according to which thinking is a computational process defined over mental representations that are physically realized in the brain.

What are the principal characteristics of modular processing according to Fodor?

These characteristics are as follows: their operation is (1) domain specific, (2) mandatory once activated (and proceeds automatically), (3) fast and (4) informationally encapsulated; the processes of modules are (5) not centrally accessible (only their output is), they have (6) shallow outputs, (7) exhibit specific “ …

What does informationally encapsulated mean?

A cognitive system is informationally encapsulated to the extent that in the course of processing a given set of inputs it cannot access information stored elsewhere; all it has to go on is the information contained in those inputs plus whatever information might be stored within the system itself, for example, in a …