Reply to Professor Zaitchik

Jerry A. Fodor

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 42, No. 2. (Dec., 1981), pp. 292-293.

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DISCUSSION

REPLY TO PROFESSOR ZAITCHIK

Professor Zaitchik's "defense" of physicalism would have glad- dened the heart of Mr. Pickwick, but it gladdens not mine. My point was that, on what seem plausible assumptions about the non-coextensivity of physical and psychological kinds, we must give up either (1) the reduction of intensional to physical explanation, or (2) the construal of intensional theories as enunciating true causal ex- planations. What Zaitchik has done is simply to opt for (2), accepting the consequence that there may be no science in which we can ar- ticulate such causal explanations as our linguistics, our decision theory, our psychology of perception, our learning theory, etc., now appear to provide. There will be no such science if, as could well turn out, our neurology (or our physics) provides no projectable predicates coextensive with those that our intensional sciences deploy. In that case, on Zaitchik's view, there will be an explanation of the fact that certain formulae occur in all optimal computational models of the organism, but those formulae will be -as it were -mentioned rather than used. The success of the computational models will therefore not be explained in the way that we explain the successes of other highly valued scientific theories: viz., by the assumption that they are true. We will be able to say- to put it vulgarly- that and why "if you itch you want to scratch" occurs in all optimal models, but we will not be able to say that it is because if you itch you want to scratch. Indeed, we will not, ex hypothesi, be able to say that if you itch you want to scratch at all, no projectable predicates coextensive with 'itch', 'want' and 'scratch' having been provided. That is what it is like to give up your psychology on grounds of physicalist prejudice. But now: if it is not an objection to the physicalist methodology that it rules out on a priori ground what appear to be scientific explanations in good stand- ing, what would be an objection to that methodology?

By the way, the putative counterexample in footnote 7 cuts no ice since, in the circumstances imagined, the token of "peck here now" is not functioning as a representation of a rule (or of anything else) in the etiology of the pigeon's behavior; it is just ,.functioning as a discriminative stimulus. What this shows is only what is obvious on in- dependent grounds: that to flesh out the intensionalist story we need

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an account of what it is for a token to represent -and, more general- ly, for something to be a token of a formula in a system of representa- tions. I see no reason to doubt that this can be done; certainly Zaitchik has given no argument for doubting that it can. If it can, then the idea that intensionally characterizable behavior is behavior in which mental representations are causally implicated will be just what we need to explain why the postman is -and the planets are not -follow-ing rules in the execution of their appointed routes.

JERRY A. FODOR. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY.