FODOR, Jerry. Semantics: an interview with Jerry Fodor. ReVEL. Vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.

ISSN 1678-8931
[www.revel.inf.br/eng].

SEMANTICS AN INTERVIEW WITH JERRY FODOR

Jerry Fodor
Rutgers University

ReVEL There are certainly many different answers to a question such

What is Semantics? But we will dare to ask you anyway: in your
opinion, what is Semantics and what does it study?
Fodor - I suppose a semantics theory of a language, natural or artificial, is part of a
grammar of that language. In particular, its the part of a grammar that is concerned
with the relations between symbols in the language and the things in the world that
they refer to or are true of. The analogy is to a syntactic theory of a language. As that
notion is understood by generative grammarians, a syntax is about which
expressions are well formed in the language that it describes; in particular, it
distinguishes the expressions that belong to the language from the ones that dont,
and it represents certain structural properties of complex symbols including,
importantly, their constituent structure. The intuition is that syntax is about how the
expressions in a language are put together, and semantics is about how they relate to
their referents in the nonlinguistic world.
This is to take a more or less Tarskian view of semantics. So, as Tarski says, a correct
semantics of language L would, at a minimum, determine the conditions under which
the (declarative) sentences of L are true. A semantics for English would thus include,
among its infinity of entailments, the theorem that the English sentence snow is
white is true if and only if the world is such that snow is white; the English sentence
Kant was a philosopher is true iff Kant was a philosopher, and so forth.
Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, such Tarski sentences are by no
means trivial or empty. You can see this if you assume that the semantic properties of

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English sentences are described in some language other than English. That the cat
said meow is true if and only if le chat a dit meow is patently not trivial. To the
contrary, its just the sort of fact that a French speaker who is trying to learn English
(or an English speaker who is trying to learn French) would need to know.
Several caveats:
- I assume that the system of mental representations constitutes a language
(Mentalese); accordingly, the proposed understanding of what semantics is about is
intended to hold, inter alia, for mental representations (in particular, for concepts
and the constructions that they enter into, both of which are thought of, for these
purposes, as formulas of Mentalese). I think it is very likely that only mental
representations have semantic properties (truth and reference) in the first instance.
Formulas in natural languages inherit their semantic properties from those of the
mental representations that they are used to express. To a first approximation, snow
is white means that snow is white in English because its the form of words that
English speakers use to express the belief that snow is white.
- This proposal is, in several respects, a relatively exiguous understanding of what
semantics is about. In the Empiricist tradition especially it has generally been
supposed that semantics should specify which of the formulas in a language are
analytic or true in virtue of their meanings alone. So, for example, a correct theory
of the semantics of English would entail that x is a bachelor means something like x
is an unmarried man, and so is true of a person x if and only if x is male and
unmarried. Accordingly, the sentence if x is a bachelor then x is unmarried is true in
virtue of the meanings of its constituent terms; it expresses an analytic truth. This
view of semantics as concerned primarily with linguistic (/conceptual) truth is still
widely prevalent among linguists; and many analytic philosophers hold it in some
version or other. That they do is not surprising. This kind of theory purports to
explicate notions like conceptual truth, truth of informal logic, truth of depth
grammar criterion etc. These various notions differ from one another in various
ways; but they share the idea that some truths are necessary and a priori because
they hold just in virtue of the meanings of the symbols that express them. If that is
so, this kind of semantic theory would rationalize undertakings like the analysis of
word meanings or of conceptual content; and, according to many philosophers, such

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conceptual/linguistic analyses are the typical products of philosophical inquiry.

However, for (inter alia) reasons that are familiar from the work of Quine and his
followers, I very much doubt that this conception of semantics can be sustained.
- I assume that, in all the languages of interest (including English and Mentalese),
there are infinitely many expressions that can be evaluated for truth and reference:
this is the cat, this is the dog that chased the cat, this is the dog that chased the cat
that ate the rat... and so forth indefinitely. Most of the work of a semantic theory is to
explain how the semantics of these (infinitely) many formulas are determined by
their syntax together with the semantics of their (finitely) many primitive
constituents. So, very roughly, the cat ate the rat is true if and only if the cat in
question ate the rat in question; and that, in turn, is true because the cat refers to the
cat and the rat refers to the rat and the world is such that the former ate the latter.
This is the sort of thing semanticists have in mind when they say that the semantics
of natural languages (and of Mentalese) must be compositional. As it turns out,
compositionality is a very strong constraint on semantic theories; one which, quite
possibly, can be met by only theories that identify the fundamental semantic
properties of symbols as truth and reference.

ReVEL In your opinion, why does meaning seem to be central to

everything human, as Ray Jackendoff puts it in his Foundations of
Language?
Fodor Actually, I think it isnt. If meaning seems to be ubiquitous thats because
its used as a cover term for all sorts of things that are, in fact, quite different from
each other. Meaning is, in short, radically ambiguous; not noticing that it muddies
the water in all sorts of ways.
For example, the meaning thats referred to in notions like the meaning of a word is
quite different from the meaning that is referred to in smoke means fire, which is
again quite different from the meaning that is referred to in I cant tell you how little
existential phenomenology means to me. Its quite easy to show that this is so.
Consider the following argument: Smoke means smoke; smoke means fire;

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therefore smoke means fire. Clearly the argument trades on the ambiguity of
means: In the first premise, means means something like REFERS TO; in the
second premise it means something like INDICATES. If, however, you just take for
granted that means means the same thing in both premises, you wont be able to
explain why the argument isnt valid.
Pace Jackendoff, I think that for purposes of theory construction, we would be well
advised to forget about the everyday notion of meaning, the one according to which it
seems to saturate our lives. Even in what purports to be scientific discourse, there are
all sorts of things that psychologists and philosophers have meant by meaning, and
attempts to bring all of them into the same framework of theory have quite generally
been unsuccessful. Consider psychological associationism as a pertinent example.
Heaven only knows how many books and articles have been written, over the last 150
years or so, which claim that the meaning of a word or the content of a concept is the
set of associations that it has a high probability of evoking. That cant be true, of
course; Dog is a high associate of cat, but cat doesnt mean dog. Nonetheless, the
confusion of meaning with association persists in psychology and continues in
cognitive science at large. Such currently fashionable views as that conceptual
contents are stereotypes or that concepts are arranged in a neural network are
current version of traditional associationism and they succumb to the traditional
anti-associationist arguments.
Still, I do think that there is a semantic notion that is of central theoretical interest in
psychology and linguistics and that does some of the work that meaning has
traditionally been supposed to do; namely, REPRESENTATION. Perhaps the most
important thing to understand about the cognitive mind is that it is somehow able to
represent the world. What makes that so important is that, all else equal, how one
acts is determined by how one represents the world (rather than by how the world
actually is.) Of course, when all goes well and ones belief about the world is true, the
way that one represents the world as being is the way that the world actually is. Its in
such cases that actions based on ones beliefs are most likely to be successful. By
contrast, if actions based on false beliefs ---that is, on misrepresentations of the
world--- succeed, its an accident that they do so. Likewise, its part of what Englishspeakers know about English that if someone utters John is hungry (and a variety of

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what John Austin called felicity conditions on speech acts are satisfied) he is telling
you that John is hungry. Its in such cases that actions based on what one has been
told are most likely to be successful.
Thats fine as far as it goes; its entirely plausible that, from the semantic point of
view, the essence of language and mind is representation. But this claim lacks a
metaphysics; it doesnt tell us what representation is except that its typified by
symbol-world relations like truth and reference. How to understand the metaphysics
of representation, is among the deepest and most hotly debated of current
philosophical issues; all the more so if one accepts on the assumption that the
metaphysics of representation must be naturalistic. That is, a representational
psychology (/linguistics) must be compatible with other empirical theories that we
independently have reasons to believe are true; for example, with brain science, to
say nothing of nonbiological theories in chemistry, physics and so forth. Lots of
philosophers who do assume some sort of naturalism think that a proper theory of
representation would construe semantic properties as in some way constituted by
causal relations between the mind and the world. That strikes me as plausible prima
facie since, in many kinds of cases, it would seem to be our causal encounters with the
world that make our thoughts have the contents that they do. Very, very roughly, the
paradigm might be that the concept DOG represents dogs because interactions with
dogs cause us to think dog. The operative phrase here is very, very roughly. Nobody
knows, in any detail, how a causal theory of representation might actually work; but it
had better work somehow or other if the line of thought Ive been pursuing is even
close to being right.

ReVEL The problem of meaning and reference is classical in the study

of Semantics and Philosophy of Language. And you have made some
interesting contributions to it. How can you compare your approach to
the problem to the approach given by Noam Chomsky, for example?
Fodor - Im not at all sure that I understand how Chomsky views semantics. But, as
far as I can tell, he thinks that its not about relations between ideas and the world,
but rather about relations among the ideas themselves. The typical kind of semantic

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relations among ideas, on that sort of view, are the ones that engender analyticities
(such as that whatever falls under the concept BACHELOR ipso facto falls under the
concept UNMARRIED MALE; see above.) There is, in philosophy a very long history
of holding such views (Hume, for example, appears to have done so; maybe Kant did
too.) Often the reasons for holding it have been epistemological. The line of thought is
something like this: Since knowledge involves representation, one cant know what
the world is like in itself viz how it is independent of the ways that we represent it.
So, if representation is itself a kind of mind-world relation, we cant know whether we
ever do succeed in thinking about the world. (/about what our words mean, etc.)
Suppose, however, that representation is constituted by relations among thoughts.
Since we can know about such relations (by introspection for example) we likewise
can know for sure such putatively analytic truths as that bachelors are unmarried,
that cats are animals, and so forth. In effect, the proposal is to avoid skepticism about
knowledge by adopting a sort of Idealism about meaning: all our ideas are ideas
about ideas.
As I say, Im not at all sure that this is Chomskys view. I hope it isnt because,
whereas my confidence in many other of Chomskys views is practically unbounded,
succumbing to representational Idealism strikes me as a strategy that is to be avoided
at all costs. Here are some reasons, all of which I take to be more or less truistic:
- It is wildly implausible that we dont, at least some of the time, think about the
world. Semantic Idealism seems to deny this and hence to be false on the face of it.
- The Idealist sort of semantics requires that there are lots of analytic propositions
(enough to fix the content of each of our concepts). But the evidence is that there are,
at most, not very many. (Quite possibly there are none that are untendentious
including unmarried men are bachelors. Is the Pope a bachelor?)
- The view of meaning that Im supposing Chomsky endorses avoids skepticism about
whether bachelors are unmarried; we really can know that they are; in fact, anyone
who has the concept BACHELOR must know that they are. Likewise for the
knowledge that if John killed Mary, then Mary is dead, etc. But its very unclear how
this is supposed to work for knowledge of contingent propositions (for example the

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case of ones perceptually grounded true belief that the cat is on the mat.) In such
cases, our knowledges simply cant come from our grasp of relations among ideas: Its
not part of the idea CAT that this one (the one Im, just now looking at) is on a mat;
and its not part of the idea MAT that this one now has a cat thats on it. Its plausible
on the face of it, that empirical knowledge is a mind-world relation. That being so, it
would seem that Semantic Idealism avoids skepticism about conceptual truths only
at the cost of making a total mystery of empirical truth. (Its notable that the currently
fashionable post-Modern relativism about truth, knowledge and the like (which, by
the way, I entirely abhor, and so should you) invariably starts by assuming that there
is nothing beyond the text; viz that our concepts are constrained by the their
relations to one another but not by their relations to the world.
- For essentially similar reasons, semantic Idealism cant account for the fact that, at
least some times, we are able to make rational choices among conflicting beliefs; in
particular, among conflicting scientific theories. Rather, according to semantic
idealists, theories cant be rationally compared because what their terms in a theory
means is determine internal to the theory. If I think dogs have tails and you think
they dont, then we must mean something different by dog so theres no way of
settling what appears to be the disagreement between us. In fact, strictly speaking,
there isnt a difference between us. For a really flagrant example of this dialectic
working itself out, see Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
according to which scientists whose theories differ radically live in different worlds.
There must be something wrong with a semantics that entails this sort of thing since,
patently, we all live in the very same world; viz this one.
The long and short is that Idealistic semantics rejects the notion of mind-world
correspondence, renders the content of our beliefs intractably holistic, and makes it
unintelligible that any of our beliefs are rational. I doubt that Idealist semantics is
worth having at that price.
- If semantic relations hold only among ideas, then everything we can think about is
mind-dependent. But its simply untrue that whatever we can think about is mind
dependent. For example, we can think about The Grand Canyon, which surely was
around before there were any minds and presumably will continue to be when all the

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minds are gone. The world (consider as the potential object of indefinitely many
thoughts) is prior to the mind. A fortiori, the objects of thought cant themselves all
be mental.
Its an infallible sign of bad semantics that it leads to bad metaphysics.

ReVEL How does the idea of Mentalese relate to other semantic

theories available on the market? We know that this idea has already
been challenged by a variety of philosophers and linguists. What are the
main arguments from the critics and how do you respond to them?
Fodor The story about Mentalese isnt, and has never purported to be, a version
of semantics. To the contrary, if (as I suppose) Mentalese is a language (viz the
language in which one thinks) then it itself requires a semantics, just like any other
language. On the roughly Tarskian view of semantics that Ive been sketching, an
acceptable semantics for Mentalese would have to entail, for example, that the
concept DOG is satisfied by and only by dogs; that the thought that thats a dog is
true if and only if, thats a dog; and so forth for the indefinitely concepts and thoughts
that our psychology permits us to entertain.
In short, qua language, Mentalese needs a theory of the truth and reference of its
formulas. Indeed (as remarked above) it may be that Mentalese is the only language
that needs a semantics; for example, that words and sentences of English have the
contents they do because they are used to express the content of the corresponding
words and sentences of Mentalese. This is, to be sure, a psychologistic theory of
linguistic content. As far as I can tell, its none the worse for being so.
So, the Mentalese story is about (not semantics but) the character of mental
representations; its the theory that the mental symbols that we use to represent the
world in our thoughts are like sentences (and not much like, for example, pictures).
The arguments for this view are, I think, pretty nearly overwhelming. On the one
hand, its needed to account for the productivity of thought; just as English grammar
places no upper bound on the number of sentences that are available for us to utter,

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so the grammar of Mentalese places no upper bound on the number of thoughts that
are available for us to have. Likewise, its required in order to connect cognitive
psychology with logic. It does so by explaining how the 1ogical form of inferences
can affect the course of our thinking in inferential processes and its required to
connect cognitive psychology with the theory of computation. It does so by explaining
how mental objects like thoughts and concepts can provide domains for mental
processes like reasoning; namely, by treating mental processes as species of
computations which are, by definition, formal operations defined over the syntactic
structure of representations.
This last point is no small matter. One of the main things wrong with the empiricist
tradition in representational theories of mind was its commitment to an
associationistic treatment of cognitive process which, in the event, proved to be
utterly untenable. That the computational treatment of cognitive processes offers a
radical break with the associationist tradition may well be the most important idea
that grounds our current cognitive science. And, to repeat, the theory that mental
processes are computations depends on the theory that mental representations are
sentence-like; in particular computations that mental representations have
constituent structures.
It seems to me overwhelmingly plausible that, if one is going to endorse a
representational theory of mind at all, one ought to opt for the Mentalese version. But
the arguments for Mentalese, though they support the theory that we think in some
sort of language, leave open which language it is. They dont, for example, rule out the
possibility that we think in English. So, although the canonical versions of the
language of thought thesis hold that Mentalese is an unlearned representational
system with many of the formal properties of a logic, it is possible to hold a much less
dramatic version of the thesis consonant with its letter if not with its spirit. One
might hold that we think in whatever language we speak in; e.g. that English speakers
think in English, French speakers think in French, and so forth. This is, perhaps, the
only version of a representational theory of mind that many philosophers are even
remotely inclined to accept. Unaccidently, it has striking affinities with the sort of
Watsonian behaviorism according to which thinking is a kind of talking to oneself.

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Though few philosophers explicitly endorse behaviorism these days, its surprising
how much of it one finds alive just below the surface.
I think, however, that the identification of Mentalese with English really isnt an
option. The most persuasive consideration is the truism that English has to be
learned, presumably by some sort of inductive (or abductive) inferences over what
one hears in ones linguistic environment. But since drawing inferences is itself a kind
of thinking, the theory that one thinks in a language that one has learned is doomed
to circularity; the identification of Mentalese with English (or, mutatis mutandis, any
other natural language) really is out of the question.
If thats right, then there is decisive reason to dissociate two uses of languages that
philosopher often run together, sometimes as a matter of principle. On the one hand,
theres the role of language as the medium in which cognitive processes are typically
couched; and, on the other hand, theres the role of language in mediating
communication between speakers and hearers. The line of thought weve been
pursuing suggest that these functions must be performed by different languages:
Mentalese is employed for the first, but not for the second; English is employed for
the second but not for the first. This bears emphasis in light of claims by
Wittgenstinians (and, by the way, of Whorfians) which would seem to deny that such
a dissociation is possible; to hold, in effect, that only a public language really is. To
my knowledge, no serious argument for that view has ever been proposed; nor, as far
as I know, to my knowledge, has any Wittgensteinian (or Whorfian) offered so much
as a sketch of an account of how, if English is itself the vehicle of thought, how
learning English is so much as possible (Wittgenstein says, not very helpfully, that its
a matter of training.)
If, however, that line of argument doesnt convince you, there are others on offer. On
even cursory examination, English would appear to be a bad choice as the
representational format for thought. I mention just two of the many reasons. First,
English is full of both structural and lexical ambiguities, and its thoroughly unclear
what it could be to think an ambiguity. Notoriously, everyone love someone is
ambiguous with respect to the scope of the quantifiers. But could one think the
thought that everyone loves someone without choosing between the possible scopes?

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Is it possible to think that everyone loves someone and simply not know whether one
is thinking that there is someone that everyone loves? What would it be like to be in
such a state? And, importantly, how on earth could one get out of it if one had once
gotten into it?
The point this illustrates (that the language of thought must be ambiguity free) is, in
fact, special case of a quite general consideration: mental representations must be
explicit as to their logical form. Philosophers have been pointing out, literally since
Aristotle, that natural languages dont meet this condition; that is, they arent explicit
about the properties of thoughts that determine their roles in inference. The
inevitable conclusion seems to be that one doesnt think in a natural language.
I repeat the point I made above: If one is going to have a representational theory of
mind at all, the version of choice is clearly the one that makes Mentalese its format
(where, by assumption, Mentalese isnt a natural language; it isnt ever used as a
vehicle of communication.) To be sure, this leaves it open that one might refuse to
endorse a representational theory of mind of any sort. But the only kind of alternative
Ive heard of is some sort behaviorism, and weve been down that road before. It leads
nowhere.

ReVEL As an experienced semanticist, philosopher and cognitive

scientist, can you please suggest some basic, essential, outstanding or
classical readings in the field of Semantics?
Fodor This is a hard question to answer, because many of the classical books and
papers that treat semantics in the way Ive endorsed are relatively technical (some
logic and/or some linguistics is required to read them) and they dont even purport to
provide an overview of the theoretical options. And, as the previous discussion must
have suggested, there is considerable and vehement disagreement not just about
which semantic theory is best, but even about what problems such theories are
supposed to address and what data they are supposed to accommodate. The best I
can do is suggest a scattering of texts which provide a more or less untechnical

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treatment of some kinds of issues that I take to be central. The items Ive starred are
collections of papers, many of which are foundational.
*Antony and Hornstein (eds) CHOMSKY AND HIS CRITICS
Fred Dretske, KNOWLEDGE AND THE FLOW OF INFORMATION
Hartry Field, Tarskis theory of truth
*Geirsson and Losonsky (eds) READINGS IN LANGUAGE AND MIND
Christopher Hughes KRIPKE; NAMES, NECESSITY AND IDENTITY
Saul Kripke, NAMING AND NECESSITY
Hilary Putnam, The meaning of meaning
Jerry Fodor, THE LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore, THE COMPOSITIONALITY PAPERS
Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylshyn Connectionism and cognitive architecture
*Margolis and Laurence (eds) CONCEPTS
*Stich and Warfield (eds.) MENTAL REPRESENTATION

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