"The shop foreman [in one's head] goes about supervising that activity in a way that is, in essence, a microcosm of supervising tying one's shoe. Indeed the shop foreman might be imagined to superintend a detail of wage slaves, whose functions include: searching inputs for traces of shoelace, flexing and contracting fingers on the left hand, etc."
— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)
Author
Date
1968
Metaphor
"The shop foreman [in one's head] goes about supervising that activity in a way that is, in essence, a microcosm of supervising tying one's shoe. Indeed the shop foreman might be imagined to superintend a detail of wage slaves, whose functions include: searching inputs for traces of shoelace, flexing and contracting fingers on the left hand, etc."
Metaphor in Context
We might thus consider expanding the population in one's head to include subordinate little men who superintend the execution of the "elementary" behaviors involved in complex sequences like grasping a shoelace. When the little man reads 'take the left free end of the shoelace in the left hand', we imagine him ringing up the shop foreman in charge of grasping shoelaces. The shop foreman goes about supervising that activity in a way that is, in essence, a microcosm of supervising tying one's shoe. Indeed the shop foreman might be imagined to superintend a detail of wage slaves, whose functions include: searching inputs for traces of shoelace, flexing and contracting fingers on the left hand, etc.
(p. 628)
(p. 628)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Jerry Fodor, "The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanation," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No. 20 (Oct. 24, 1968): pp. 627-640. <Link to JSTOR>
Theme
Homunculus
Date of Entry
05/20/2011
