Jerry Fodor interview
Kay
by Mark Vernon -- Researching a piece on philosophy, ancient and
modern, for the FT Magazine, I spoke to a number of big hitters.
Here's something of my exchange with Jerry Fodor.
MV: What is philosophy?
JF: I think that philosophy consists mostly of criticism. What
philosophers do is take more or less informal and unformulated systems
of beliefs that are in use or that have been proposed, and try to make
them articulate, to figure out whether they are consistent, and, in
general, to help reduce the level of ambient confusion; which, in
practice, is generally pretty high.(BTW, I think that doing that sort
of thing is a main component of what philosophy has ALWAYS been
about). On this view, philosophy is mostly a meta-level activity.
Other people (typically, but by no means always, empirical scientists)
try to say what's going on. Philosophers look over their shoulders
and, when possible, try to figure out exactly what it is that they'e
saying.
MV: How would you charactertise the contribution that philosophers are
making to contemporary civic discourse, from issues in politics to
those in science?
JF: I guess that, from time to time, philosophers have actually helped
advance the discussion in one or other of the empirical sciences; most
recently in linguistics, psychology and some of the wilder parts of
physics. This has been partly a matter of trying to figure out what
the theories currently on offer actually amount to (see above); but
it's also by way of characterizing empirical investigation as such,
including such topics as the nature of confirmation, explanation,
observation and the like. Much the same might be said about
philosophical work in areas like ethics and the philosophy of law
where there are, I suppose, problems of interpretation and
reconstruction not disimilar to those that arise about science: What
do the things people say and believe (about (as it might be) the
relation between someone's intentions and the evaluation of his
actions) fit together. Are these beliefs consistent? What general
principles do they illustrate? And so forth. (I should also say
philosophers have often enough contributed by muddying the waters. The
disasterous impact of behaviorism, operationalism and pragmatism on
20th century social science came about, in large part, because some
psychologists actually believed what philosophers told them about the
'scientific method'.)
MV: On a more personal level, could you summarise why philosophy
continues to engage you?
JF: I think I'm not really very interested in philosophy. I'm
interested in how the mind works; willy nilly, that requires being
interested in such very hard topics as how (mental) representation
works. It also means trying to understand how various sorts of
psychological theories work (or fail to); see above. In practice, this
involves a mix of meta-level analysis and fairly abstract empirical
inquiry. I don't worry very much about which of these I'm doing at a
given time. For one thing, the distinction isn't itself crystal clear;
and, for another thing, why does it matter?
I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did,
and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask
someone whose credentials consist of a Ph.d. in philosophy.
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