I'm looking up Anthony Chemero's book "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science", and the first sentence of the preface is:
"Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher.
I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.
...My goal is that this book is for non-representational, embodied, ecological psychology what Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975) was for rationalist, computational psychology."
Jerry Fodor himself was fond of saying, of his ideas with Ernie Lepore, "Absolutely no one agrees with us, which leads me to believe we might be right."
I was studying Neural Networks in grad school (advisor was statistician from Bell Labs) at Rutgers and took a bunch of classes with Jerry, so I had these debates on a daily basis.
Unless you summarize Chemero's critique, though, I can't really respond to it.
Fodor didn't claim that connectionist models couldn't encode symbolic manipulation, just that the pertinent activity from the perspective of "thought" is symbolic manipulation. So he (I believe) would have said, maybe the connectionist can explain it or maybe he can't and who cares.
He did care that "concepts" were not statistical entities. They were "atomic" and basically tokens for the language of thought. So, Jerry argued, the concept of "Lion" could not be complex i.e. composed of cat, claws, teeth etc.
I posted a link and very brief summary elsewhere here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730489
He discusses Fodor on p. 26 as part of a critique of conceptual/a priori (Hegelian) arguments.
I don't consider myself either for or against Fodor's argument but I think the summary does great injustice to his arguments.
Fodor does claim that, for what he describes as language, systematicity and compositionality are essential features. However, the "evidence" he cites isn't from a study. It is primarily from facts about language.
To use one of his favorite examples, take these sentences:
The cat ate the rat.
The rat ate the cat.
If you understand sentence 1, you can understand sentence 2, and furthermore, the words "cat", "ate" and "rat" mean the same thing.
He takes those facts to be uncontroversial, and he says that that is what he means by systematicity and compositionality.
This "ability comes in clusters" bit is very confusing, and I am not sure what he means by it.
Fodor doesn't care that connectionists don't have good models for symbolic manipulation. He says that connectionists models are only good in so far as they reduce to symbolic manipulation because symbolic manipulation are the only models we have that demonstrate compositionality and systematicity.
> He takes those facts to be uncontroversial, and he says that that is what he means by systematicity and compositionality.
Right, but Chemero's point is that that premise is not so empirically grounded; it is an a priori assumption.
I am not familiar with this literature, but it's ultimately the same point that he makes against Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument (the literature on which I know much better): that it's not an empirically grounded premise, and the evidence for such an a priori argument is weak.
"Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher. I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.
...My goal is that this book is for non-representational, embodied, ecological psychology what Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975) was for rationalist, computational psychology."