SEMANTICS – AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY FODOR
Jerry Fodor
Rutgers University
http://www.revel.inf.br/files/entrevistas/revel_8_interview_jerry_fodor.pdf
"...
Fodor - I’m not at all sure that I understand how Chomsky views semantics. But, as
far as I can tell, he thinks that it’s not about relations between ideas and the world,
but rather about relations among the ideas themselves. The typical kind of semantic
relations among ideas, on that sort of view, are the ones that engender analyticities
(such as that whatever falls under the concept BACHELOR ipso facto falls under the
concept UNMARRIED MALE; see above.) There is, in philosophy a very long history
of holding such views (Hume, for example, appears to have done so; maybe Kant did
too.) Often the reasons for holding it have been epistemological. The line of thought is
something like this: Since knowledge involves representation, one can’t know what
the world is like ‘in itself’ viz how it is independent of the ways that we represent it.
So, if representation is itself a kind of mind-world relation, we can’t know whether we
ever do succeed in thinking about the world. (/about what our words mean, etc.)
Suppose, however, that representation is constituted by relations among thoughts.
Since we can know about such relations (by introspection for example) we likewise
can know for sure such putatively analytic truths as that bachelors are unmarried,
that cats are animals, and so forth. In effect, the proposal is to avoid skepticism about
knowledge by adopting a sort of Idealism about meaning: all our ideas are ideas
about ideas."
page 5, last paragraph