Introduction
In the previous chapter we saw that one of the crucial assumptions behind cognitivism was what Fodor called methodological solipsism. This is the idea, ultimately deriving from Descartes, that the mind is to be understood in its own terms rather than in terms of its connection to the environment. The nature, even the existence, of an environment external to the mind is as irrelevant to a description of its operations as it would be to the description of a computer’s programe: the program is still the same program regardless of what is going on outside the computer.
We also saw that one of the corollaries of this view was that all the constraints and structuring of behaviour could not be seen as the effects of environmental or situational factors because these were considered irrelevant to the actual nature of the mind. Structure, even the structure of overt behaviour, had to come from inside the mind. Fodor puts it thus:
Behavior is organized, but the organization of behavior is merely derivative; the structure of behavior stands to mental structure as an effect stands to its cause.
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