Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003
pages 16-17 | 3120 words
More Peanuts
Jerry Fodor
- Thinking without Words by José Luis Bermúdez
Oxford, 225 pp, £25.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 19 515969 1
‘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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Letters
Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003
From Bill Myers
Jerry Fodor underestimates the complexities of Stanley's first words to Livingstone (LRB, 9 October). He was referring jokingly to the line 'Mr Stanley, I presume' in The School for Scandal, not for Livingstone's benefit – missionaries are above that kind of thing – but with an eye to posterity. Of course, it may all have been unconscious. But Fodor is surely right on the main point: we all infer like mad from the beginning to the end of life, and are only rarely conscious of the fact. Stanley's joke is a fair example. He was making very complicated inferences about the impression he would make back home.
However, I question Fodor's suggestion that Stanley-type inferences could be effected by 'some kind of computing machine since computations are themselves plausibly construed as chains of inferences'. They are nothing of the sort. They are chains of implemented instructions that only look like inferences to real inferrers, which people are and computers are not.
Bill Myers
Leicester
Vol. 25 No. 21 · 6 November 2003
From Adrian Bowyer
Bill Myers writes that computer-generated inferences are 'nothing of the sort. They are chains of implemented instructions that only look like inferences to real inferrers, which people are and computers are not' (Letters, 23 October). Alan Turing would have asked: how can anyone (or anything) tell the difference between something that looks like an inference and an inference?
Adrian Bowyer
University of Bath
From Richard Bland
I have always thought that Stanley was saying, in coded form, that he was being so bold as to speak to a gentleman to whom he hadn't been introduced (Letters, 23 October).
Richard Bland
Dunblane
