Grazer Philosophische Studien

Volume 46, 1993

Holism: A Consumer Update

The Impossibility of Punctate Mental Representations

In Holism: A Shopper's Guide Fodor and LePore contend that there could be punctate minds; minds capable of being in only a single type of representational state. The Kantian idea that the construction of perceptual representations requires the synthesizing activity of the mind is invoked to argue against the possibility of punctate minds. Fodor's commitment to an inferential theory of perception is shown to share crucial assumptions with the Kantian view and hence to lead to the same conclusion. The argument from the need for synthesis is then extended beyond the perceptual case to mental representation in general.