Fodor’s ‘Guilty Passions’: Representation as Hume’s Ideas

Jerry Fodor (1985) has joked that philosophers have always been prone to eccentric worries such as an anxiety about the existence of tables and chairs, but with the issue of mental representation they have found a problem that is real and crucial for progress in the cognitive sciences. However, given Fodor’s ‘methodological solipsism’ of computational symbols and their ‘formality condition’, Jackendoff (1992) has facetiously asked “Why, if our understanding has no direct access to the real world, aren’t we always bumping into things?” It is no accident that Jackendoff’s parody recalls Samuel Johnson’s famous retort to Berkeley’s “ingenious sophistry” by kicking a stone. There is an acute irony in the fact that cognitive science has simply rediscovered the philosophers’ traditional worry about tables and chairs. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Fodor’s latest book Hume Variations endorses the classical Empiricist ‘idea’ idea of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The paper explores Fodor’s concept of ideas as mental objects in relation to its historical antecedents.