Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In his new book, The Elm and the Expert, Fodor attempts to reconcile the computational model of human cognition with information-theoretic semantics, the view that semantic content consists of nothing more than causal or nomic relationships between words and the world, and intentional content of nothing more dian causal or nomic relationships between brain states and the world. We do not challenge the project, not in this paper. Nor do we show that Fodor has failed to carry it out. Instead, we urge that his analysis, when made explicit, turns out rather differently than he thinks. In particular, where he sees problems, he sometimes shows that there is no problem. And while he says two conceptions of information come to much the same thing, his analysis shows that they are very different.