title: Syntax, content and functionalism: What is wrong with the syntactic theory of mind creator: Aydede, Murat subject: Cognitive Psychology subject: Artificial Intelligence subject: Philosophy of Language subject: Philosophy of Mind description: I argue that Stich's Syntactic Theory of Mind (STM) and a naturalistic narrow content functionalism run on a Language of Though story have the same exact structure. I elaborate on the argument that narrow content functionalism is either irremediably holistic in a rather destructive sense, or else doesn't have the resources for individuating contents interpersonally. So I show that, contrary to his own advertisement, Stich's STM has exactly the same problems (like holism, vagueness, observer-relativity, etc.) that he claims plague content-based psychologies. So STM can't be any better than the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) in its prospects for forming the foundations of a scientifically respectable psychology, whether or not RTM has the problems that Stich claims it does. date: 1996 type: Preprint type: NonPeerReviewed format: text/html identifier: http://cogprints.org/352/1/STM.v1.html identifier: Aydede, Murat (1996) Syntax, content and functionalism: What is wrong with the syntactic theory of mind. [Preprint] (Unpublished) relation: http://cogprints.org/352/