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Physics of the Human Mind pp 85–131Cite as

Fodor-Kim Dilemma

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Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, developed, in particular, the concept of multiple realizability arguing for nonreductive physicalism. Jaegwon Kim (born 1934) is a Korean American philosopher, in his works he, in particular, posed the famous exclusion problem arguing against nonreductive physicalism. Their contradictory points of view on the relationship between mental phenomena and the corresponding physiological processes have initiated ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind and are significant for the problems under consideration in the present book. So in this chapter we elucidate the basic ideas proposed by Fodor and Kim and discuss a way to overcoming their contradiction I call the Fodor-Kim dilemma.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Steup (2014) can be referred to for a detailed description of epistemology.

  2. 2.

    Hofweber (2014) can be referred to for a detailed description of ontology.

  3. 3.

    When this level hierarchy is regarded as the system of different academic disciplines, the coarsening means the transition from a base discipline (lower level) to a target one (upper level) via constructing some “bridge laws” (Nagel 1961, 351–354). These bridge laws are needed to relate the main notions and the laws of an upper level discipline to that of the base (lower level) discipline.

  4. 4.

    The problem of causal drain is discussed in more details in Sect. 3.6.6

  5. 5.

    According, e.g., to Robinson (2015) and Walter (2007), in the philosophy of mind epiphenomenalism is the view that mental states or events are caused by physical states or events in the brain but do not themselves cause anything. For example, raising a hand is a result of muscle contraction caused by neural impulses induced by sense organs; on the epiphenomenalist view mental events play no causal role in this process. This statement admits a direct generalization to complex systems of another nature.

  6. 6.

    In these statements I do not aspire to give an exhaustive description of the meaning of the used notions, nevertheless, the present form suffices to explain the crucial points of Kim’s argumentations.

  7. 7.

    Here the term “property realization” can be understood in the sense that P plays the causal role associated with M (e.g. Block 1980; Melnyk 2003, 2006) or the property M has the property P as a realizer just in case (i) the forward-looking causal features of the property M are a subset of the forward-looking causal features of the property P, and (ii) the backward-looking causal features of M have as a subset the backward-looking features of P (Shoemaker 2007, Chap. 2).

  8. 8.

    This hypothesis corresponds to presentism, a philosophical doctrine that only the present exists, which is discussed in more detail in Sect. 2.4

  9. 9.

    Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry (Steup 2014).

  10. 10.

    http://plato.stanford.edu

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  1. Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Aizu, Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan

    Ihor Lubashevsky

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Lubashevsky, I. (2017). Fodor-Kim Dilemma. In: Physics of the Human Mind. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51706-3_3

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