Don’t bet the chicken coop 
Jerry Fodor
- Thinking about Consciousness by David Papineau
A note to Royall Tyler’s elegant new translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji explains that ‘Hahakigi (“;broom tree”) is a plant from which brooms were indeed made and that had the poetic reputation of being visible from afar and of disappearing as one approached.’* Well, philosophers live in a thicket of such things; it is often very trying.
Consider, as an example, current philosophical discussions of consciousness. Lots of us think that, details aside, Lucretius had things about right. What there really is is atoms-and-the-void, and there’s really nothing else. True, the story about atoms is more complicated than Lucretius supposed; so, too, is the story about the void. But the underlying materialist intuition continues to be plausible; everything is the same sort of stuff as familiar, ontologically untendentious objects like rivers, rocks and stars. The whole world is that sort of stuff in its myriad configurations. So construed, materialism is a sound bet on a research programme: sooner or later, science will figure out what it is that everything is made of. The results from our first couple of millennia pursuing this programme have been pretty good. It now seems probable, for example, that not just rocks, rivers and stars, but also many animate things are material through and through. That’s most encouraging.
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Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
A Science of Tuesdays · Jerry Fodor writes about the Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World by Hilary Putnam
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
Headaches have themselves · Panpsychism
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
Look! · Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
Who ate the salted peanuts? · Michael Frayn
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