From Tim Crane's review of Jerry Fodor's Hume Variations (OUP) in the Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 2004, p. 4:
"With characteristic hyperbolic gloom, Fodor calls pragmatism 'the defining catastrophe of analytic philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in the last half of the twentieth century.' Its attempts to do without (something like) the theory of ideas is 'a shambles from which philosophy has yet to fully recover.' But what exactly is pragmatism? The essence of the view is that thinking or having concepts should be understood in terms of abilities: for example, in terms of the ability to classify things, or to make inferences, or to be able to recognize things, and so on. What pragmatism is opposed to is the theory that (in Barry Stroud's words) 'having an idea is fundamentally a matter of contemplating or viewing an "object"'--in other words, that ideas are mental particulars or objects in the mind. The pragmatist argues that this view, supposedly one of the targets of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, is fundamentally flawed because it cannot account for the function of thinking or having concepts; instead this function must be explained in terms of practical or mental abilities....
"The idea that thinking is a kind of ability or activity or capacity is initially attractive; until one starts to try to figure out what kind of ability it might be. Consider the idea that the ability to think about Xs, say, is the ability to distinguish Xs from other things. But what is it to 'distinguish' [sort] something from something else?...
"[Fodor's] objection is that even if one were able to sort the Xs from the Ys--let's say by putting them into two piles--this would not show that one was sorting Xs from Ys as such. Suppose someone had the task of sorting triangles from squares, by putting all the triangles in one pile and the squares in another. The problem is that though the piles are the result of sorting the triangles from the squares, they would also be the result of sorting the trilaterals from the squares, since all triangles are trilaterals and vice versa. Sorting Xs from Ys is therefore compatible with not sorting them as Xs and Ys."
Is Fodor right? Comments are open.
(The May 7 issue of TLS, by the way, has lots of good philosophy reviews--see esp. Tamler Sommers's quite critical review of Susan Hurley's Justice, Luck and Knowledge, P.F. Strawson's laudatory review of Wolfgang Kunne's Conceptions of Truth, Dean Zimmerman's review of Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra's Resemblance Nominalism, and Jonathan Wolff's review of Philip Pettit's A Theory of Freedom. TLS is really the only general intellectual journal that runs reviews of serious philosophy by serious philosophers on a regular basis. The profession is indebted to Galen Strawson, who advises the TLS on philosophy reviews, and who is thus most responsible for this excellent resource.)
