Susuto

“Fodor readily acknowledges that if he is correct, babies must be born with the concept airplane and video tape, and in fact all babies who have ever been born were born with every concept that ever has or ever will exist.”

Fodor should readily acknowledge that he’s an idiot, because it’s not one or the other. You don’t have to be able to define words with words OR ELSE BABIES MUST KNOW ABOUT AIRPLANES AT BIRTH. There ARE other alternatives.

And the alternative is obvious. Words have fuzzy meanings. And those fuzzy meanings don’t all overlap the same space. So one word, or even many words may not be able to completely cover the space defined by another word.

Consider how we have words for colors. There are an infinite number of colors, so we can never precisely describe a particular color with words. We might say a color is blue. But keep adding red to it and at some point someone’s gonna say it’s blue and another person will say it’s magenta, and who’s right, and what word do we really use to describe it?

The brain does not store information as words. It stores them in an analog form as references to various objects and experiences. “Anger” is your red faced father screaming at you at the top of his lungs for breaking an expensive vase while playing ball in the house after he’s told you not to. And many other experiences with it.

I hope nobody is funding this stupid study.