Neo-Empiricism and the Structure of Thoughts
Neo-Empiricism and the Structure of Thoughts
According to neo-empiricism, the vehicles of tokened concepts are not different in kind from the vehicles of perceptual representations. In this chapter, I argue that if neo-empiricism were right, our capacity to think—to move from thought to thought—would be either mysterious or a matter of a contingent history of learning. Fodor and Pylyshyn's classic article against connectionism is used to develop this criticism, since neo-empiricists’ views about the nature of thoughts suffer from problems similar to those Fodor and Pylyshyn diagnosed with connectionism twenty-five years ago.
Keywords: Systematicity, Neo-empiricism, Concepts, Thinking, Prinz, Barsalou
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