Top Jerry Fodor Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Jerry Fodor Biography

Jerry Alan Fodor (/ˈfoʊdər/; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."

Read about Jerry Fodor in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Jerry Fodor Quotes

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.

Mean, Differences, Views, Postulated, Psychological, Fundamentally

On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

Bad, Bad Day, Philosopher, Philosophers, Sometimes, Wonder

The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.

Doe, Kind, Virtue, Flourishes, Situations

There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.

Emphasis, Knowledge, Philosophy, Structure, Understand, Waiting

Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e. g. , the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

Class, Data, Determining, Encodes, Level, Thinking

. . . there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds.

Class, Correspond, Kinds, Knowledge, Mind, Nature

. . . monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interesting about monetary exchanges is surely not their commonalities under physical description. A natural kind like a monetary exchange could turn out to be co-extensive with a physical natural kind; but if it did, that would be an accident on a cosmic scale.

Knowledge, Law, Interesting, Things, Under, True

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

Data, May, Bears, Bear, Organism

. . . if it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying. . . If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it's the end of the world.

Believe, Everything, Knowledge, Mind, Responsible, World

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. . . . [but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.

Philosophical, Thinking, Doubt, Minimum, Grabs

Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

Drawing, Debt, Pay, Checks, Way

The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.

World, Way, Relation, Thought, External

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

Syntax, Virtue, Process, Processes, Take

Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.

Make, Onions, Self, Self Pity, Weep