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A Reply to Churchland's “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Jerry A. Fodor
Jerry A. Fodor*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
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Abstract

Churchland's paper “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality“ offers empirical, semantical and epistemological arguments intended to show that the cognitive impenetrability of perception “does not establish a theory-neutral foundation for knowledge” and that the psychological account of perceptual encapsulation that I set forth in The Modularity of Mind “[is] almost certainly false“. The present paper considers these arguments in detail and dismisses them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 188 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

REFERENCES

Churchland, P. M. (1988), “Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor”, Philosophy of Science 55: 167–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1983), The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1987), Psychosemantics. Cambridge: The MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Held, R. and Bossom, J. (1961), “Neonatal Deprivation and Adult Rearrangement: Complementary Techniques for Analyzing Plastic Sensory-Motor Coordinations”, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 56: 872–876.CrossRefGoogle Scholar