This theme of Fodor's work is most evident in the first chapter of

Psychosemantics.

38 In 'The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation' he describes what he labels as '"intellectualist" accounts of mental competencies' as answering "how" questions by means of the specification of computer programs. He writes:

Second, Fodor has frequently argued that non-basic laws (and for him all special science laws are non-basic) have implementing mechanisms, and that it is a scientific concern to describe such

mechanisms. Here is how he puts the point in The Elm and the

Expert::

There must be an implementing mechanism for any law of a nonbasic science, and the putative generalizations of psychology are not exceptions. An implementing mechanism is one in virtue of whose operation the satisfaction of a law's antecedent reliably brings about the satisfaction of its consequent. . . . Typically,

[A] psychological model in the form of a machine program for simulating the behaviour of an organism ipso facto provides, for each type of behaviour in the repertoire of that organism, a putative answer to the question "how does one produce behaviours of that type?", the form of the answer being a set of specific instructions for producing the behaviour by performing a set of machine operations. Hence to be interested in simulating behaviour is to be interested in a range of "how" questions about behaviour that psychological tlieories built on the nomological-deductive model are not designed to answer (p. 75).

And as an example of such a psychological explanation he presents the following account of how we tie our shoe laces:

There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library. When one acts upon the intention to tie one's shoes, the little man fetches down a volume entitled Tying One's Shoes. The volume says such things as: "Take the left free end of the shoelace in the left hand. Cross the left free end of the shoelace over the right free end of the shoelace . . etc.

When the little man reads the instruction 'take the left free end of the shoelace in the left hand', he pushes a button on a control panel. The button is marked take the left free end of a shoelace in the left hand'. When depressed, it activates a series of wheels, cogs, levers, and hydraulic mechanisms. As a causal consequence of the functioning of these mechanisms, one's left hand comes to seize the appropriate end of the shoelace. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the rest of the instructions.

Tlie instructions end with the word 'end'. When the little man reads the word 'end', he returns the book of instructions to his library.

though not invariably, the mechanisms that implement the laws of a science are specified in the vocabulary of some other, lower level science. Thus, it's a law that water freezes if it is suitably cooled. The mechanism that implements this law involves various changes in the molecular structures of water that suitable cooling reliably induces, (p. 8).

In the case of intentional laws the implementing mechanisms are syntactic and the task of describing these mechanisms falls to scientific psychology. So not all scientific psychological explanation is a matter of explaining PA tokenings or behavioural events by appeal to the PAs that are their causes. My account of scientific psychology can be described as implying that its central task is to describe the mechanisms that implement those intentional generalisations that correspond to our cognitive capacities. When described in these terms a crucial similarity between my account and that of Fodor becomes apparent. However, there is an im portant point of dissim ilarity. Fodor effectively divorces intentional from computational or syntactic psychology; for him, their respective practitioners are involved in distinct explanatory enterprises. I, on the other hand, have emphasised that the intentional and the syntactic/computational are intertwined in explanations of cognitive capacities.

Third, Fodor accepts that scientific psychology recognises the existence of subpersonal representational states and processes. Indeed, appeals to such states and processes figure prominently in his

own psychological work. Consider The Modularity of Mind. In that

book he presents an account of the architecture of the mind that distinguishes between the central cognitive system and various input m odules (for example the visual module). Beliefs - and other personal level intentional states - reside within the central cognitive system. The input modules are information-processing systems that present their output to the central cognitive system and thus play a role in belief fixation. However, none of the representational states generated by their activity are beliefs; rather, they are subpersonal states of a subpersonal inform ation-processing system. The processing activity of the input modules is largely unaffected by the subject's beliefs and is therefore cognitively impenetrable. The input

modules are, in Fodor's terminology, informationally encapsulated. Similarly, the information that the input modules have access to in the course of executing their information-processing tasks is limited and domain-specific. For our purposes the important point is that Fodor would accept that scientific psychology is committed to the reality of subpersonal representational states and processes. Moreover, he would see it as a psychological project to determine the workings of the input modules, a project that is part and parcel of that of explaining our cognitive capacities.

Therefore, there are good reasons for not charging Fodor with holding a mistaken or impoverished account of the nature of scientific psychology and psychological explanation despite the fact that he sometimes writes as if that discipline were little more than an extension of folk psychology. However, my account of scientific psychology will play an important role in my evaluation of Fodor's philosophy of mind; many of my criticisms of his most important and provocative claims - along with my contribution to the issues that those claims address - will be motivated by it in one way or another. For, despite all the above, Fodor has a tendency to become fixated on folk psychology and folk psychological explanation when engaged in his philosophical projects, a fact that often has less than happy consequences.

Chapter 3

Individ ualism and the Explanation of