# RePresentations -Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science Fodor **Opening (not a real abstract):** Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science JERRY A. FODOR THIS IMPORTANT COLLECTION of eleven essays. by one of the world's foremost linguistic philosophers, deals with methodological and empirical issues in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind. Among the methodological issues, two are outstanding: the status of functionalism considered as an alternative to behaviouristic and physicallistic accounts of the mental, and the status of reductionism considered as account of the relation between the psychological and the physical sciences. The chapters dealing with these issues trace the connection between the claim that mental states arc functionally defined and the claim that psychological theories are not, in general, reducible to theories in the "hard" sciences. The remainder of the book is devoted to **Authors:** [[Jerry A. Fodor]]