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Hubert Dreyfus (1982) has argued that Husserl was an anticipator of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, and that there are great affinities between Husserl's phenomenological attitude and Jerry Fodor's methodological solipsism. Dreyfus points out that Husserl was the first thinker to put special emphasis on the directedness of mental representations (Dreyfus, 1982, p. 2). He divides HusserFs theory of intentionality into two stages of development. In his view, the first phase corresponds to what Fodor calls the representational theory of mind, and the second doctrine is linked to the Fodorian computational theory of mind, which is a strong version of the representational theory (ibid., p. 3). The early and less sophisticated theory consisted in the idea that the act of consciousness does the work of representing an object and its relation to the subject. Instead, he argues, the later theory, which was formulated around 1908 and developed in detail in the first volume of the Ideen (1913), maintained that the noetic act is intentional only because a noema is correlated with it (ibid., p. 7). On Dreyfus's construal of Husserl, there must be something in the mind which takes care of three tasks. It guarantees that an object outside the mind is picked out, that the object is described under some aspect and that such descriptions are added which the object could have while being the same object.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8334-3_8

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