ON THE ORIGINS OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND FODORIAN COGNITIVE SCIENCE: A PROPAEDEUTIC TO A UNIFIED EXPLANATORY THEORY.

The article focuses on tracing the origins of phenomenology in the work of Edmund Husserl and its relation to Jerry Fodor’s computational theory of mind (CTM), arguing for a unified explanatory theory that integrates phenomenology with Fodorian cognitive science. It identifies Husserl’s “natural psychological mechanism of symbolic inference” as a computational mechanism that processes mental representations syntactically and unconsciously, thereby preserving truth and underpinning both unconscious and conscious judgment. The author distinguishes two classes of phenomena in phenomenology—sensuous-associative (pre-predicative) and categorial-syntactic (predicative)—and proposes that the latter, which includes productivity, systematicity, and compositionality, are best explained by CTM rather than associative mechanisms. The article contends that Husserl’s phenomenology, traditionally descriptive, requires supplementation by causal-explanatory mechanisms like CTM to achieve scientific explanatory adequacy, and that this integration is consistent with Husserl’s own writings and the nature of scientific explanation. Finally, it argues that Fodorian cognitive science, as an anti-empiricist framework grounded in a priori laws, falls outside the scope of the naturalistic empiricism Husserl critiques, thus allowing for a non-reductive, computational foundation of phenomenology. [Extracted from the article]