Complex Ideas: Fodor's Hume Revisited

Abstract

In 2003, Jerry Fodor published Hume Variations (HV), a book sitting astride The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (Fodor 2000) and LOT 2 (Fodor 2008). Sadly, we now know that the latter would end up being Fodor’s last solo effort to defend the Representational/Computational Theory of Mind (RCTM) in book format. Thereafter two collaborative endeavors ensued, the widely vituperated What Darwin Got Wrong (Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini 2010) and the sketchy Minds Without Meanings (Fodor & Pylyshyn 2015). The former could easily be connected with Fodor (2000) as striking the, in our opinion, definitive blow on evolutionary psychology, while the latter elaborated on Fodor’s (2008) referentialist account of the content of intentional states, hinting, also in our opinion, at the basis of what might eventually constitute a solution for this hard problem—we held our breaths awaiting the next season, only to recently know that it would not be shot. This apparently leaves HV in a kind of no man’s land and seemingly makes of it a relatively minor work not worth the attention of the casual follower of the happenings in the philosophy of mind—a text for wholehearted fans only.1 However, when read as part of a trilogy that opens with Fodor (2000) and culminates with LOT 2, HV acquires a full sense of its own as the necessary link between the computational model of the former and the theory of ideas developed in the latter. Especially, we believe, when Fodor’s Hume is reassessed under the reading we propose here. In HV, Fodor got it right when he asserted that the etiology of complex ideas is the crux of Hume’s psychology; but he didn’t get it completely right, for Hume’s etiological suggestions are more complex and nuanced than they surface in Fodor’s portrait. The first section of this note is aimed at explaining why we believe so. Thereafter, we move to the question of what, according to Fodor, Hume got inexcusably wrong. Again, while we would like to suggest that Fodor got this partially right, we nonetheless believe that Hume’s contentions are not as inexcusably wrong as Fodor argued them to be, even from the point of view of a