Representational Theory of Mind Chapter 2

What is the function of our mental states?
RTM- while mental states differ, one from another, mental states are representational states, and mental activity is the acquisition, transformation, and use of information and misinformation.
Contrast between human mental life and non-human mental life:
(1) We are flexible in our behavioral capacities.
(2) We are sensitive to the info in a perceptual stimulus rather than to the physical format of the stimulus.
The underlying idea here is that adaptive flexibility, especially learning, requires an ability to represent the world, for it is the info in the stimulus, not its physical form, that our behavior is sensitive to.
The big question: In virtue of which of their properties do the propositional attitudes (such as beliefs and desires) play the role they do in the causation of behavior? We need to show how physical systems like ourselves could have mental states that (a) represent and misrepresent the world, and (b) participate in the causation of behavior.
The No Magic Powers Constraint to answers to the big question: The functions allegedly essential to mental states must be functions actually performable by physical stuff.
One attempt at answering the big question- the language of thought hypothesis.
3 arguments for LOT [see Fodor Language of Thought book for more detail]: (1) semantic parallels between thoughts and sentences. (2) Syntactic parallels between thoughts and sentences. (3) Processing argument- processing has characteristics that make commitment to a language of thought inescapable.
If Fodor is right about LOT, we can naturalize the representational theory of mind. And it supports belief-desire (intentional) psychology, enables us to formulate three theses about the occupants of intentional roles:
Thesis 1: Propositional attitudes are realized by relations to sentences in the agent's language of thought. [this is intentional realism- humans' behavior and mental states are often the product of their beliefs and desires]
Thesis 2: The psychologically relevant causal properties of propositional attitudes are inherited from the syntactic properties of the sentence tokens that realize the attitudes.
Thesis 3: The semantic content of propositional attitudes are explained by the semantic properties of mentalese. The semantic properties of a token of mentalese are explained by its syntactic structure, and the semantic properties of the concepts that compose it.
Potential worry: Representational theories of mind that are unsupported by computational models risk turning into magical/circular theories of the mental, by positing an undischarged homunculus.
Computational models of cognitive processes help psychological theories avoid this regress (of the undischarged homunculus) in 3 different ways:
(1) Individualism: The processes that operate on mental representations are sensitive to the individualist or narrow properties of these representations. So, cognition is the processing of mental representations. But the cognitive mechanisms must be tuned to the structural features that code meaning, for they have no direct access to the extracranial causes of those features. Kinda like elementary formal logic.
(2) Mechanizing reason- it makes precise and manageable the idea of decomposing an ability into subabilities.
(3) 'Hard-wired' Reasoning Processes: In order to explain how the mind recognizes the structural features, we must posit a set of basic operations that the brain carries out, not in virtue of representing to itself how to carry them out, but in virtue of its physical constitution. So, (a) The properties of most immediate causal relevance to the cognitive mechanisms mediating the interaction of the sentence tokens in LOT are mind internal properties of some kind; (b) important cognitive processes are computational processes.
So, according to RTM, thoughts are inner representations with a double aspect- they represent in virtue of causal relations of some kind with what they represent, but their role within the mind depends on their individualist, perhaps syntactic, properties. So RTM is linked to the computational theory of the mind.