It's Greek To Me (Was Re: [lbo-talk] slavery and technology)

[ravi]

At around 17/12/06 9:06 am, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> ... told them that the law is loaded with that sort of
> stuff ... but mainly because it makes lawyers seem like
> they are really smart to use expressions in languages
> they don't understand.
>

Yes, I noticed the tendency in law.


> Fodor's a
> total fraud about this, I don't believe he knows Latin
> at all.

Perhaps he wants to come across as erudite and witty as Quine (is
supposed to be). ;-) It is a decent book though (The Mind Doesn't Work
That Way) -- a response to Pinker's [over]confident 1000(*) page tome on
the workings of the mind (what is it in the waters of the Charles that
produces the cockiness of Dennett, Pinker and a whole bunch of others!).

 While endorsing the CTM (unsurprisingly) Fodor offers a convincing
(IMHO) account of holistic factors ("abduction") in belief causation
that questions the explanatory power of the theories offered by what he
(and others?) term The New Synthesis crowd (CTM + massive modularity +
adaptationism/EP).

	--ravi

(*) perhaps a bit less than 1000.