Check out my recent paper here (outline below)!

In Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998), Fodor provides a list of conditions he claims any adequate theory of concepts must meet. Among the entries is what is known as the publicity constraint - concepts must be shareable across distinct agents. In attached paper, I examine motivation for requiring theories of concepts meet the publicity constraint. I also extract, explain, and motivate four premises Fodor employs in arguing for this constraint. In passing, I outline aspects of Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis, paying particular attention to the representational and computational theories of mind. Next, I formalize and defend Fodor’s argument that generalizable laws of psychology entail concepts must be public. I then evaluate Fodor’s argument, ultimately declaring it unsound given his commitment to an informational semantic account of mental state content coupled with his response to Frege Puzzles which plague such accounts. On Fodor’s behalf, I propose motivating the publicity constraint via argument to the best explanation, while noting such a tactic is an uphill battle.