Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher. He lived from April 22, 1935, to November 29, 2017. Fodor was known for his ideas about how the mind works and how we think.

Fodor wrote many books and articles about the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Two of his big ideas were the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses. These ideas helped people understand the mind better.

When he passed away in 2017, Fodor was a special professor at Rutgers University. Before that, he taught at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT. His work influenced many people studying philosophy and the mind.

Life and career

Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He studied at Columbia University, where he wrote about the thinker Søren Kierkegaard, and later earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University.

Fodor taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years, then moved to the City University of New York before becoming a professor at Rutgers University, where he worked until 2016. In addition to philosophy, he loved opera and wrote about it for the London Review of Books. He is remembered for his important work on how the mind works.

Philosophical work

Jerry Fodor believed that our thoughts and desires are linked to special ideas in our minds, called mental representations. He thought these ideas could only be understood by thinking of them as a special kind of language inside our heads. This "language of thought" is real and written into our brains.

Fodor also thought that many parts of our mind, like how we see and understand language, work like separate tools. These tools help us understand the world. Later in his life, Fodor studied how words and thoughts mean things and argued against some common ideas about how the mind works.

Awards and honors

Jerry Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received many awards and honors during his career. Some of these include the New York State Regent's Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Princeton University, the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1993, he won the first Jean Nicod Prize for his work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He also gave important lectures at the University of Oxford and other places, and in 2005, he received the Mind & Brain Prize.

Criticism

Philosophers had different ideas from Jerry Fodor.

Simon Blackburn thought Fodor's idea about understanding words might cause thinking to go on forever. Fodor said this wasn’t true because thinking works directly.

Daniel Dennett said we don’t always need exact thoughts to explain how we or computers act. For example, when you play chess against a computer, you might say the computer “thinks” about moving a piece, but it isn’t really thinking—it just follows steps. Dennett thought this also happens with many of our automatic actions.

Linguists and philosophers of language like Kent Bach did not agree with Fodor’s strong belief that many ideas in our minds are fixed. They felt this made it hard to explain how words can have different meanings in different situations.

Fiona Cowie also had different views from Fodor, saying we learn many concepts through experience instead of being born with them. Fodor answered her criticisms in an article.

Books

Jerry Fodor wrote many books about thinking and how our minds work. Some of his well-known books include The Language of Thought from 1975 and The Modularity of Mind from 1983, both published by the MIT Press. He also wrote Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong in 1998 and What Darwin Got Wrong with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in 2010. His books discuss big ideas about how we understand the world and think.