I mentioned
some time ago, when discussing Daniel Stern’s attempt at tracing meaningful
interpersonal interactions, that there is a convenient way to bypass the knotty
problem of how representations - or what ”comes in” - obtain meanings that can
be expressed by referential, or symbolic, means. You just ignore the divide and
concentrate on either side. Because Stern did not want to do this, he crashed
into the problem. His effort to solve it demonstrate that a number representational
modes must be assumed and, specifically, one that allows for the transition.
Stern called it “proto-narrative envelope”. To me, this construction is not entirely
convincing.
Disregarding
the number and nature of representational modes that make up our experience of
the world, the other problem is the number of mental faculties that must be
postulated to account for the incoming
information. Stimulated by Ibn Sina’s Medieval account of the five faculties inthe perceptual soul, I left the issue of meaning for a while and began reading
Jerry Fodor’s and Peter Carruthers’ views of mind modules. What an interesting
world of thought it is. As a psychotherapist being inspired by Lev Vygotsky,
Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Donald Winnicott, I left behind the
cognitive approaches to the mind in the early 1970s. Hence, the more
philosophical discourse on the computational
models of the mind is a foreign territory to me and I have to proceed
cautiously.
Both Fodor and Carruthers subscribe to the
assumption on multiple functions, or modules, that mediate between the flow of
sensory input and the mind. Their main difference seems to be in the level and
extent of such modules. Fodor claims that the central (computational) processes
are non-modular, while Carruthers supports a “massive modularity” theory of the
mind. Both share the view that mental modules are innate, hard-wired systems
that operate according to their inner rules.
Interestingly, when Fodor published his
seminal book “The modularity of mind” (1983), he added “An essay on faculty
psychology” as the subheading. Indeed, within the Aristotelian framework of how
the mind relates to the world there is logically no alternative. Although written almost thirty years ago, Fodor’s
book is a relevant work that introduces the modern version of the ancient model
of understanding the soul’s operations. Here is an illustration how Fodor
approaches the issue of incoming forms:
Any mechanism whose states covary with
environmental ones can be thought of as registering information about the
world; and, given the satisfaction of certain further conditions, the output of
such systems can reasonably be thought of as representations of the environmental states with which they covary …
But if cognitive processors are computational
systems, they have access to such information solely in virtue of the form of the representations in which it
is couched. Computational processes are, by definition, syntactic; a device which makes information available to such
processes is therefore responsible for it format as well as its quality… if we
think of the perceptual mechanisms as analogous to such devices, then we are
saying that what perception must do is to
so represent the world as to make it accessible to thought. ” (Fodor: The
modularity of mind, pp. 39-40, original italics).
It is not
easy to unpack this statement. In fact, the whole book is an elaboration of
this basic formulation. For the time being, I only pay attention to the first
and the last sentences in the passage. Aristotle’s view of the co-varying mechanism covered the sense
organs and the internal common sense, whose joint operation produced phantasmata as the output, in a mode
that was accessible to thought. This
analogue does not do justice to Fodor because, elsewhere, he explicitly rejects
the “resemblance theory” of mental representations.
True, since Descartes
representations could not anymore be conceived of as “forms without matter”.
The division between “res extensa” and “res cogitans” implied a radical
transformation from the material to the ideal mode of existence. The concept of
representation has indeed changed a lot. However, the notion of sensory
processes that covary with external
states, register information about the world, and present this information to
thought, faithfully repeats the ancient model of the mind.
