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A Reply to Churchland's “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Jerry A. Fodor*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Abstract

Churchland's paper “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality“ offers empirical, semantical and epistemological arguments intended to show that the cognitive impenetrability of perception “does not establish a theory-neutral foundation for knowledge” and that the psychological account of perceptual encapsulation that I set forth in The Modularity of Mind “[is] almost certainly false“. The present paper considers these arguments in detail and dismisses them.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

REFERENCES

Churchland, P. M. (1988), “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor”, Philosophy of Science 55: 167187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1983), The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1987), Psychosemantics. Cambridge: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Held, R. and Bossom, J. (1961), “Neonatal Deprivation and Adult Rearrangement: Complementary Techniques for Analyzing Plastic Sensory-Motor Coordinations”, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56: 872876.CrossRefGoogle Scholar