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During the 1980s and 1990s, Jerry Fodor, Brian McLaughlin, and Zenon Pylyshyn argued that thought is in various respects systematic. Further, they argued that a so-called classical syntactically and semantically combinatorial system of mental representations provides a better explanation of the systematicity of thought than do nonclassical alternatives.1 During the 1990s, part of what made the systematicity arguments problematic was the subtlety of the idea of providing a better explanation. In what sense is the classical account better than its rivals? During what we might call the post-connectionist era of roughly the last ten years, however, theoretical shifts have made it even more difficult to bring considerations of systematicity to bear on the nature of cognition. This chapter will have a very simple structure. The first section, “The Systematicity Arguments Then,” will describe one type of systematicity and provide some reason to think that human vision displays this type. In this section, the principal concern will be to draw attention to the challenge of explicating the notion of better explanation that was in play during the 1990s. The second section, “The Systematicity Arguments Now,” will describe one of the new challenges facing the systematicity arguments. Part of this challenge stems from a shift in research emphasis away from cognition and on to behavior. Insofar as one is interested in behavior rather than cognition, one is certainly going to be less interested in putative properties of cognition, such as its systematicity. More dramatically, post-connectionist cognitive science often displays a breakdown in the earlier consensus regarding the relationship between cognition and behavior. Insofar as one denies the existence of cognition or simply equates it with behavior, one is all the more likely to reject putative properties of cognition and cognitive architecture, properties such as systematicity. 3 Tough Times to Be Talking Systematicity Ken Aizawa 78 Ken Aizawa 1 The Systematicity Arguments Then In their seminal paper, Fodor and Pylyshyn provide a simple empirical argument that thought is systematic.2 They note that language is systematic —that there are patterns among the set of grammatical sentences of natural language. Indeed, discovering and explaining these patterns is essentially the raison d’être of syntacticians, and they have traditionally explained these patterns by appeal to properties of a grammar and a lexicon. Consulting the linguistics literature will bear this out. If one adds to this observation the assumption that understanding a sentence of one’s natural language involves having the thought expressed by that sentence, then the existence of patterns in the sentences of one’s natural language implies that there will be corresponding patterns in the thoughts that one can entertain. It is these patterns in thought that Fodor and Pylyshyn contend deserve an explanation, and indeed an explanation in terms of a classical system of mental representation.3 Fodor and Pylyshyn provide one path to understanding and accepting systematicity, but McLaughlin suggests another. In “Systematicity, Conceptual Truth, and Evolution,” McLaughlin invites us to consider the following cognitive capacities: 1. the capacity to believe that the dog is chasing the cat and the capacity to believe that the cat is chasing the dog, 2. the capacity to think that if the cat runs, then the dog will and the capacity to think that if the dog runs, then the cat will, 3. the capacity to see a visual stimulus as a square above a triangle and the capacity to see a visual stimulus as a triangle above a square, and 4. the capacity to prefer a green triangular object to a red square object and the capacity to prefer a red triangular object to a green square object. (McLaughlin 1993, 219) Of these capacities, he notes that they are capacities to have intentional states in the same intentional mode (e.g., preference, belief, seeing as). Moreover, the paired capacities are semantically related. This is indicated in a rough-and-ready way by the fact that we use the same English words to describe each of the capacities in a pair. McLaughlin’s third pair of capacities, namely, the capacity to see a visual stimulus as a square above a triangle and the capacity to see a visual stimulus as a triangle above a square, provides an alternative, nonlinguistic source of evidence for systematicity. One can detect some systematicity of perception by visual inspection of images. More importantly for some, the systematicity of perception is well attested in the vision science literature, [3.141.8.247] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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