  The present document is an excerpt of an essay that I wrote as part of my
application material to graduate school in Computer Science (with a focus on
Artificial Intelligence), in 1986. I was not invited by any of the schools that
received it, so I became a theoretical physicist instead. The essay's full
title was "Some Topics in Philosophy and Computer Science". I am making this
text (unchanged from 1985, preserving the typesetting as much as possible)
available now in memory of Jerry Fodor, whose writings had influenced me
significantly at the time (even though I did not always agree).
