Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor (April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) 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.

He received his A.B. degree (summa cum laude) from Columbia University in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on Søren Kierkegaard and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, and 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 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960."

In his article "Propositional Attitudes" (1978), Fodor introduced the idea that mental states are relations between individuals and mental representations.

Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, the idea that intentional attitudes are relational has remained unchanged from its original formulation up to.

In that article, he attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states.

Fodor considers two alternative hypotheses.

The first completely denies the relational character of mental states and the second considers mental states as two-place relations.

The latter position can be further subdivided into the Carnapian view that such relations are between individuals and sentences of natural languages and the Fregean view that they are between individuals and the propositions expressed by such sentences.

Fodor's own position, instead, is that to properly account for the nature of intentional attitudes, it is necessary to employ a three-place relation between individuals, representations and propositional contents.

Considering mental states as three-place relations in this way, representative realism makes it possible to hold together all of the elements necessary to the solution of this problem.

Further, mental representations are not only the objects of beliefs and desires, but are also the domain over which mental processes operate.

They can be considered the ideal link between the syntactic notion of mental content and the computational notion of functional architecture.

These notions are, according to Fodor, our best explanation of mental processes.

Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism.

Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts.

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

These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Historically, questions about mental architecture have been divided into two contrasting theories about the nature of the faculties.

The first can be described as a "horizontal" view because it sees mental processes as interactions between faculties which are not domain specific.

From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).

From 1988 until his retirement in 2016 he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he was emeritus.

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

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

He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind.

Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool.

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.

For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles.

These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character.

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

This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world.

The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.

Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents.

His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism.

Fodor strongly opposed reductive accounts of the mind.

He 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.

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

At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.