33 Facts About Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22,1935, and was of Jewish descent.

From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Besides his interest in philosophy, Jerry Fodor passionately followed opera and regularly wrote popular columns for the London Review of Books on that and other topics.

Jerry Fodor argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations.

Jerry Fodor maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought in the mind.

Jerry Fodor adhered to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.

Jerry Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects.

Jerry Fodor argued that mental states are multiple realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses.

Jerry Fodor emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterized as the ill-grounded Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of natural selection.

Jerry Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became one of the most vocal proponents of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander, which is the author cited in the references instead, more specifically Hollander's In search of the soul.

The ability to elaborate information independently from the background beliefs of individuals that these two properties allow Jerry Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of the notion of mental content.

Jerry Fodor insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.

Jerry Fodor needs to justify representational realism to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.

Jerry Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second.

Jerry Fodor has positive arguments in favour of the reality of mental representations in terms of the LOT.

Jerry Fodor maintains that if language is the expression of thoughts and language is systematic, then thoughts must be systematic.

The second argument that Jerry Fodor provides in favour of representational realism involves the processes of thought.

Jerry Fodor identifies the central problem with all the different notions of holism as the idea that the determining factor in semantic evaluation is the notion of an "epistemic bond".

The intuitive version of this causal theory is what Jerry Fodor calls the "Crude Causal Theory".

Jerry Fodor responds to this problem with what he defines as "a slightly less crude causal theory".

Jerry Fodor must find some criterion for distinguishing the occurrences of A caused by As from those caused by Bs.

The point of departure, according to Jerry Fodor, is that while the false cases are ontologically dependent on the true cases, the reverse is not true.

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Fodor Coyne describes this book as "a profoundly misguided critique of natural selection" and "as biologically uninformed as it is strident".

Jerry Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jerry Fodor received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, Chancellor Greene Fellow, Fulbright Fellowship, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jerry Fodor won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993.

Jerry Fodor has delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he has served as Vice President and President.

Specifically, Simon Blackburn suggested in an article in 1984 that since Jerry Fodor explains the learning of natural languages as a process of formation and confirmation of hypotheses in the LOT, this leaves him open to the question of why the LOT itself should not be considered as just such a language which requires yet another and more fundamental representational substrate in which to form and confirm hypotheses so that the LOT itself can be learned.

Some linguists and philosophers of language have criticized Jerry Fodor's self-proclaimed "extreme" concept nativism.

Jerry Fodor suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP.

Jerry Fodor's theory has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes, differently, to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME.

Jerry Fodor lived in Manhattan with his wife, the linguist Janet Dean Jerry Fodor, and had two children.