A long while ago (July 3, 1992, to be precise) the Times Literary Supplement published a piece by Jerry Fodor entitled “The big idea: can there be a science of mind?” In it Fodor mentioned “three major questions to which a theory of mind is required to find answers:
- how could anything material be conscious?
- how could anything material be about anything?
- how could anything material be rational?”
Then comes what was up to now my favorite Fodor quote:
I can tell you the situation in respect of the first question straight off. Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.
Researching a piece on philosophy for the FT (Financial Times) Magazine, Mark Vernon (honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College and author of Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life) spoke to, among other big hitters, Fodor, who dropped these priceless lines:
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.
Smart fellow! Although this gem appeared in Vernon’s longer version, it didn’t make it into the FT Magazine. A pitty.
Postscript (September 6, 2007): Found another Fodor gem:
If it turns out that the physicalization – naturalization – of intentional science …. is impossible, … then it seems to me that what you ought to do is do your science in some other way … If you really can’t give an account of the role of the intentional in the physical world … by Christ … we should stop spending the taxpayer’s money. [“Roundtable Discussion.” In P. Hanson (ed.), Information, Language, and Cognition. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1990, pp.202-203.]
