Volume 30, 2005
Wayne A. Davis
Pages 399-404
On Begging the Systematicity Question
Robert Cummins has argued that Jerry Fodor’s well-known systematicity argument begs the question. I show that the systematicity argument for thought structure does not beg the question, nor run in either explanatory nor inferential circles, nor illegitimately project sentence structure onto thoughts. Because the evidence does not presuppose that thought has structure, connectionist explanations of the same interconnections between thoughts are at least possibilities. But
they are likely to be ad hoc.