38 Facts About Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of 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.

Jerry Fodor then earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam.

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

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

Jerry Fodor argued in his 1975 book The Language of Thought 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 theories of natural selection as an explanation of mind.

Jerry Fodor attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states.

For Jerry Fodor, this emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism.

Jerry Fodor noted the evidence from perceptual errors like the Muller-Lyer illusion that processes such as visually estimating the length of a line are not interfered with by the knowledge that the two lines are actually the same length.

Jerry Fodor took this to mean that the visual processes were in a separate module from knowledge.

Jerry Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became a vocal proponent of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander's In search of the soul.

Jerry Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" had taken modularity and similar ideas way too far.

Jerry Fodor insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to these researchers, the mind was a long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.

Jerry Fodor sought to justify representational realism, so as 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 went on to criticize inferential role semantics because its commitment to an extreme form of holism excludes the possibility of a true naturalization of the mental.

Jerry Fodor argued that this makes the realism of mental states an impossibility:.

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 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 served as President.

Linguists and philosophers of language such as Kent Bach 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 replied at length in a 1999 article titled "Doing Without What's Within; Fiona Cowie's Critique of Nativism", stating that he was aiming at a position halfway between nativism and empiricism.