More Peanuts 
Jerry Fodor
- Thinking without Words by José Luis Bermúdez
‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Stanley was spot on: it was Dr Livingstone. Elsewise his presuming so wouldn’t have become the stuff of legend. A question suggests itself: how did he manage to presume so cleverly? Of all the things that Stanley might have presumed, how did he hit on the one that was both pertinent and true? Why didn’t he presume Queen Victoria, for example? Or Tower Bridge?
At first blush, that sounds like an easy sort of question. In fact, it’s an abyss. Though philosophers and psychologists have been working on such matters for a couple of millennia, the best they’ve got is less a theory than a programme of research. That is the background for José Luis Bermúdez’s book, so let’s start with it.
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Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Who ate the salted peanuts? · Michael Frayn
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
Water’s water everywhere · Kripke
Look! · Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
A Science of Tuesdays · Jerry Fodor writes about the Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World by Hilary Putnam
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
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