The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

The Elm and the Expert provides a discussion of semantic issues about mental representation, with special attention to issues raised by Frege’s problem, twin cases, and the putative indeterminacy of reference. The book extends and revises a view of the relation betwen mind and meaning that the author has been developing since his 1975 book, The Language of Thought . Among philosophers, a general consensus exists that a referential semantics for mental representation cannot support a robust account of intentional explanation. This book is largely a reconsideration of the arguments that are supposed to ground this consensus. Fodor offers a theory sketch in which psychological explanation is intentional, psychological processes are computational, and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential.