Часть 1

(1) AM: Почему Вы стали философом? Вы уже много лет в философии. Случилось ли что-то, чего Вы ожидали, и многое ли изменилось с тех пор, как Вы начали заниматься философией?

(2) Jerry Fodor: It was because my parents wanted me to be a lawyer. I actually did take a Constitutional Law course in order to please them; but when I’d read some judicial decisions, it seemed to me I could make equally bad arguments without bothering to get a law degree. Hence philosophy since, being very young, I thought of philosophers as particularly rational sorts of people; a view of which faculty meetings soon disabused me.

(3) AM: Вы известны работой «Язык мысли», основная идея которой представляет ум как модульную компьютеризованную систему. Эта книга была написана в 1975 г., и затем в 2008 г. Вы написали «Язык мысли 2», в которой рассказываете, как Ваши мысли изменились за прошедшее время. Для тех, кто не в курсе всего этого, не могли бы Вы вкратце описать базовые положения Вашей теории. Ведь основной пункт Вашей теории не в том, чтобы описать следующие друг за другом мысли, а в том, чтобы объяснить связность мысли, то есть то, как мысли могут быть семантически и эпистемологически причинно связаны друг с другом, иначе у нас не было бы общего смысла происходящего.

(4) J.F.: Language of Thought is a throwing together of ideas, some borrowed from Empiricists, some from Rationalists and some from theories about computers. The book was an attempt to connect these bits and pieces. I arrived at a view that was already much in the air, albeit less than explicitly: the mind gets at the world by representing it; cognitive processes are operations that the mind performs on mental representations. In fact, I think what I recommended taking out was distinctly more original than what I recommended putting in: associationism and behaviorism. At the time, behaviorism and associationism permeated both psychology and the philosophy of mind, though in somewhat different forms.

They still do here and there. The main change in my views over the (many, many) intervening years is that I now think we should also discard a thesis that most philosophers hold explicitly and that cognitive science has never considered denying: that words, concepts and the like have ‘senses’ (meanings, contents, etc.) as well as referents.

(5) AM: Вы выражаете несогласие с такими людьми, как Стивен Пинкер. Он, например, считает, что модульный подход способен в принципе объяснить всё, но Вы менее оптимистичны. Какова причина Вашего несогласия с ними?

(6) J.F.: I take it seriously that the cognitive psychology of belief formation should be continuous with the philosophy of theory confirmation in empirical science. Science works so well because it’s just the application of rational practice to questions about how the world works (as opposed to, say, questions about why the family car has stopped running). Among the most important insights in the theory of confirmation in the last hundred years or so is the ‘Quine-Duhem’ thesis: the confirming or disconfirming evidence for an empirical theory can come from anywhere in the network of received scientific beliefs. This is to say that there are criteria of evaluation at work in scientific confirmation that are global rather than modular; hence there are no principled limitations on what may turn out to be relevant to what.