Fodor ' S Guide to Mental Representation : the Intelligent Auntie ' S Vade -mecum

pull the cat' s tail . It was going to be an awful afternoon until Uncle Wilifred thought of Mental Representations (which was a game that we hadn ' t played for years) and everybody got very excited and we jumped up and down and waved our hands and all talked at once and had a perfectly lovely romp . But Auntie said that she couldn 't stand the noise and there would be tears before bedtime if we didn ' t please calm down . Auntie rather disapproves of what is going on in the Playroom, and you can ' t entirely blame her. Ten or 15 years of philosophical discussion of mental representation has produced a considerable appearance of disorder . Every conceivable position seems to have been occupied, along with some whose conceivability it is permissible to doubt . And every view that anyone has mooted , someone else has undertaken to refute . This does not strike Auntie as constructive play. She sighs for the days when well -brought -up philosophers of mind kept themselves occupied for hours on end analyzing their behavioral dispositions . But the chaotic appearances are actually misleading . A rather surprising amount of agreement has emerged, if not about who 's winning , at least about how the game has to be played . In fact, everybody involved concurs, pretty much , on what the options are. They differ in their hunches about which of the options it would be profitable to exercise. The resulting noise is of these intuitions clashing. In this paper, I want to make as much of the consensus as I can explicit ; both by way of reassuring Auntie and in order to provide new participants with a quick guide to the game: Who 's where and how did they get there? Since it 's very nearly true that you can locate all the players by their answers to quite a small number of diagnostic questions, I shall organize the discussion along those lines. What follows is a short projective test of the sort that self-absorbed persons use to reveal their hitherto unrecognized proclivities . I hope for a great success in California . Jerry A. Fodor