Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...

The philosopher Jerry Fodor passed away on November 29th. Fodor was very influential on the philosophical discussion of psychology and of language. My understanding is that Fodor was very much on Chomsky's side of the notorious Skinner/Chomsky divide, conditioning versus nativism as an explanation of "verbal behavior." On December 3, Richard Heck posted a whimsical blog entry about a philosopher's heaven, in which Fodor is now talking ... "to Hume and Descartes and Darwin -- what a lot they have to figure out! -- and [reuniting] with his old friend Hilary Putnam and his old enemy B.F. Skinner (who's no longer thus)." They all presumably have learned to acknowledge "how little, ultimately, those agreements and disagreements mattered," because it is love that matters. I've taken advantage of Heck's comments section to ask him for further elucidation especially of that issue of nativism and the now-transcended "enmity...