Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id DAA15595 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 14 Mar 2001 03:38:40 GMT From: <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 21:41:07 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Jerry Fodor Article Message-ID: <3AAE93F3.4131.29BA92@localhost> In-reply-to: <000301c0abb2$06427180$1c6410ac@tao.co.uk> References: <OE64K8r6beUzmRf6Ci6000015c1@hotmail.com> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12c) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Article from Jerry Fodor:
>
> "It appears that recent technological developments in 'neural imaging'
> have made it possible to measure the amount of activity that's going
> on in a given brain region while a subject is engaged in some
> experimental task. And, though perhaps not mandatory, it's natural
> enough to infer from a reliable correlation between a mental process
> and a locus of neural activity that the latter is the site of the
> former. If there's a place in the brain where you find a whole lot of
> neurons going off when and only when whoever owns the brain is
> thinking about teapots, it's at least plausible, all else being equal,
> that you've found where in that brain its thinking about teapots
> happens. Likewise, if certain neurons fire at certain frequencies just
> when a guy is conscious, one might infer that that's where his
> consciousness hangs out. All the more so if the correlation holds
> across subjects.
>
> To be sure, the data aren't generally quite as clean as you might
> suppose from made-up examples, and the inferences they are said to
> suggest are by no means apodictic. But I won't dispute any of that. I
> admit, for the sake of the argument, that consciousness is correlated
> with certain neurons firing at 40 Hz cycles; and that some bits of the
> brain light up when we hear nouns but not when we hear verbs; and that
> there are (different) bits that light up when we see a thing, or form
> its mental image, but not when we hear a thing or describe it to
> ourselves. It appears there's even a place in the brain that turns on
> just when we hear a word that stands for a vegetable; 'lettuce'
> excites it but 'roast beef' doesn't. So be it.
>
> I want, to begin with, to distinguish between the question whether
> mental functions are neurally localised in the brain, and the question
> where they are neurally localised in the brain. Though I find it hard
> to care about the second, the first clearly connects with deep issues
> about how the mind works; ones that even us philosophers have heard
> of.
>
> For example: there has been, for centuries, a debate going on between
> people who think that each of the various kinds of mental process is
> more or less sui generis, and people who think that they are much of a
> likeness, all consisting of the same elements although differently
> arranged. With occasional anomalies, the argument between homogeneous
> minds and heterogeneous minds aligns with the argument between
> empiricists and rationalists; and, far from being settled, it keeps
> popping up in unexpected places. Do you think that a classical
> education disciplines the mind for whatever pursuits it later
> undertakes? If so, you should think that learning Latin gives rise to
> intellectual capacities that are more or less equally in play in
> devising a foreign policy, or designing a bridge, or making money on
> the market. Similarly, if you think there's such a thing as 'general'
> intelligence - what IQ tests are supposed to measure - then you should
> also think that designing bridges and designing foreign policies
> manifest much the same kind of cleverness, albeit applied to different
> tasks. People who are good at the one should then be, potentially,
> equally good at the other. So Veblen held, maybe naively, that society
> ought to be run by engineers; and Plato held, maybe even more naively,
> that it ought to be run by philosophers.
>
> Whereas, if you're on the rationalist side of this debate, you won't
> be surprised to find every sort of intellectual sophistication
> cohabiting with every sort of naivety, and will be disinclined to
> trust the obiter dicta of experts.
>
> I don't know who's right about all that, but it's easy to see that
> whether mental functions are neurally localised is likely to be
> relevant. If the brain does different tasks at different places, that
> rather suggests that it may do them in different ways. Whereas, if
> anything that the brain can do it can do just about anywhere, that
> rather suggests that different kinds of thinking may recruit quite
> similar neural mechanisms. So empiricists, since they typically hold
> that all mental processes reduce to patterns of associations, would
> like the brain to be 'equipotential', whereas rationalists, since they
> think that there might be as many different kinds of thinking as there
> are different kinds of thing to think about, generally would prefer
> the brain to be organised on geographical principles. Unsurprisingly,
> rationalists thought there might be something to phrenology, but
> empiricists made fun of it. (The empiricists won that battle, of
> course; but my guess is they will lose the war.)
>
> In any case, I quite see why anyone who cares how the mind works might
> reasonably care about the argument between empiricism and rationalism;
> and why anyone who cares about the argument between empiricism and
> rationalism might reasonably care whether different areas of the brain
> differ in the mental functions they perform. Likewise for anyone who
> cares about how much of the mind's structure is innate (whatever,
> exactly, that means). If you think a lot of it is, you presumably
> expect a lot of localisation of function, not just in the adult's
> brain but also in the infant's. Whereas, if you think a lot of mental
> structure comes from experience (whatever, exactly, that means), you
> probably expect the infant's brain to be mostly equipotential even if
> the adult's brain turns out not to be. Rationalists are generally
> nativists and preformationists; empiricists generally aren't either
> one or the other.
>
> But given that it matters to both sides whether, by and large, mental
> functions have characteristic places in the brain, why should it
> matter to either side where the places are? It's deeply interesting
> that there apparently are proprietary bits of the brain in charge of
> one or other aspect of one's linguistic capacities. And, no doubt, if
> you're a surgeon you may well wish to know which ones they are, since
> you will wish to avoid cutting them out. But whereas, historically,
> studies of the localisation of brain functions have often been
> clinically motivated, I take it to be currently the consensus that
> they have significant scientific import over and above their
> implications for medical practice. Very well, then: just what is the
> question about the mind-brain relation in general, or about language
> in particular, that turns on where the brain's linguistic capacities
> are? And if, as I suspect, none does, why are we spending so much time
> and money trying to find them?
>
> It isn't, after all, seriously in doubt that talking (or riding a
> bicycle, or building a bridge) depends on things that go on in the
> brain somewhere or other. If the mind happens in space at all, it
> happens somewhere north of the neck. What exactly turns on knowing how
> far north? It belongs to understanding how the engine in your auto
> works that the functioning of its carburettor is to aerate the petrol;
> that's part of the story about how the engine's parts contribute to
> its running right. But why (unless you're thinking of having it taken
> out) does it matter where in the engine the carburettor is? What part
> of how your engine works have you failed to understand if you don't
> know that?
>
> There's a funny didactic fable of Bernard Shaw's called, I think, The
> Little Black Girl in Search of God, in which the eponymous heroine
> wanders around what was then the intellectual landscape, looking for
> such wisdom as may be on offer. She runs into Pavlov, who explains to
> her why he is, rather horribly, drilling holes in the mouths of dogs:
> it's to show that expecting food makes them salivate. 'But we already
> knew that,' she says, in some perplexity. 'Now we know it
> scientifically,' Pavlov replies*. It may be that some such thought
> also motivates the current interest in brain localisation. Granted
> that we always sort of knew that there's a difference between nouns
> and verbs, or between thinking about teapots and taking a nap, we
> didn't really know it till somebody found them at different places in
> the brain. Now that somebody has, we know it scientifically.
>
> To put the same point the other way around: what if, as it turns out,
> nobody ever does find a brain region that's specific to thinking about
> teapots or to taking a nap? Would that seriously be a reason to doubt
> that there are such mental states? Or that they are mental states of
> different kinds? Or that the brain must be somehow essentially
> involved in both? As far as I can see, it's reasonable to hold that
> brain studies are methodologically privileged with respect to other
> ways of finding out about the mind only if you are likewise prepared
> to hold that facts about the brain are metaphysically privileged with
> respect to facts about the mind; and you can hold that only if you
> think the brain and the mind are essentially different kinds of thing.
> But I had supposed that dualistic metaphysics was now out of fashion,
> in the brain science community most of all. Brain scientists are
> supposed to be materialists, and materialists are supposed not to
> doubt that distinct mental states have ipso facto got different neural
> counterparts. That being so, why does it matter where in the brain
> their different counterparts are?
>
> To be sure, serendipity is full of surprises and there's always the
> chance that something might turn up. It might turn out, for example,
> that the neural loci of similar kinds of mental process are pretty
> reliably spatially propinquitous (as, indeed, the phrenologists
> generally supposed). If that were so, then good brain maps might
> usefully constrain our hypotheses about psychological taxonomy: if
> thinking of teapots happened to be side by side in the brain with
> taking naps, maybe we would then revise our intuition that the two
> really haven't much in common. But the issue is academic in the
> invidious sense since in fact there's no good reason to think that
> similarity of psychological functions generally predicts similarity of
> brain locations or vice versa. And serendipity is a frail reed; if the
> best you can say for your research strategy is 'you can never tell, it
> might pan out,' you probably ought to have your research strategy
> looked at.
>
> I once gave a (perfectly awful) cognitive science lecture at a major
> centre for brain imaging research. The main project there, as best I
> could tell, was to provide subjects with some or other experimental
> tasks to do and take pictures of their brains while they did them. The
> lecture was followed by the usual mildly boozy dinner, over which
> professional inhibitions relaxed a bit. I kept asking, as politely as
> I could manage, how the neuroscientists decided which experimental
> tasks it would be interesting to make brain maps for. I kept getting
> the impression that they didn't much care. Their idea was apparently
> that experimental data are, ipso facto, a good thing; and that
> experimental data about when and where the brain lights up are, ipso
> facto, a better thing than most. I guess I must have been unsubtle in
> pressing my question because, at a pause in the conversation, one of
> my hosts rounded on me. 'You think we're wasting our time, don't you?'
> he asked. I admit, I didn't know quite what to say. I've been
> wondering about it ever since. "
>
> * Not unlike this gem from Chomsky "In fact, it is now known that if
> you prevent visual evidence from reaching the visual system at an
> early period of life this system actually degenerates." Well, gosh.
> Who'd have thought it?
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