About a year ago, Erica gave me a free subscription to the London Review of Books so now I regularly feel guilty about hardly ever reading it. Every now and then, though, it has some must-reads. The new one has a piece by Jerry Fodor advertised on the cover as 'does my iPhone think?' It's a review of Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind and it turns out it's really about whether his iPhone is part of his mind (is there a principled difference between consulting your iPhone for information and consulting your memory?)

It's a great article and I think it shows quite clearly that Clark is wrong and there is a difference between my mind and my iPhone (or there would be if I had one).

Linguistically, its got classic Fodor style with jokes about how much philosophers get paid, two uses of 'begging the question' in the old-fashioned 'proper' sense (presupposing the answer to a question rather than just raising it), a nice explanation of the problem with slippery slope arguments, applied in passing to the question of whether abortion is homicide.

Apoa came and sat beside me while I was reading it so I started to explain it to her. Her brain quickly exploded but she also realised right away that she was on Fodor's side.

B-)