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Discussion: What's Wrong with the Syntactic Theory of Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

M. Frances Egan
M. Frances Egan*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University
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Abstract

Stephen Stich has argued that psychological theories that instantiate his Syntactic Theory of Mind are to be preferred to content-based or representationalist theories, because the former can capture and explain a wider range of generalizations about cognitive processes than the latter. Stich's claims about the relative merits of the Syntactic Theory of Mind are unfounded. Not only is it false that syntactic theories can capture psychological generalizations that content-based theories cannot, but a large class of behavioral regularities, readily explained by content-based theories, appear to be beyond their explanatory reach.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 664 - 674
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Robert Matthews, Jerry Fodor, Ausonio Marras, and Ken Warmbrod for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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