Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id KAA16664 (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 10:56:20 GMT From: <gvidan@EUnet.yu> Message-Id: <200103141053.f2EAr0f16010@smtp.EUnet.yu> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 11:57:14 +0100 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Jerry Fodor Article In-reply-to: <3AAE93F3.4131.29BA92@localhost> References: <000301c0abb2$06427180$1c6410ac@tao.co.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12a) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Could you, please, supply the URL for this paper, if it is on-line?
Thanks.
Djordje Vidanovic
On 13 Mar 01, at 21:41, joedees@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> 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?
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
Dr. Djordje Vidanovic
Professor of Linguistics and Semantics
University of Nis, Serbia
--------------------------------------
djordjev@junis.ni.ac.yu
gvidan@EUnet.yu
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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