Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher who lived from April 22, 1935, to November 29, 2017. He was well known for his important 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 shape how people understand the mind and thinking.

At the time 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 contributions to the study of 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, not just a way to describe things, and it is 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 are independent and 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. He did not agree with simple explanations of how evolution shapes our minds and thoughts.

Awards and honors

Jerry Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received many awards and honors throughout 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 from different backgrounds questioned many of Jerry Fodor's ideas.

Simon Blackburn argued that Fodor's idea about how we understand words might lead to endless loops of thinking. Fodor explained that this wasn’t the case because thinking works directly without needing to check each step.

Daniel Dennett suggested that we don’t always need exact thoughts to explain how we or computers behave. For example, when playing chess against a computer, we might say the computer “thinks” it should move a piece, but the computer isn’t actually thinking—it’s just following steps. Dennett believed this also applies to many of our own automatic actions.

Linguists and philosophers of language like Kent Bach disagreed with Fodor’s strong belief that many ideas in our minds are fixed and cannot be broken down. They felt this made it hard to explain how words can mean different things in different situations.

Fiona Cowie also challenged Fodor’s views, supporting the idea that we learn many concepts through experience rather than being born with them already in place. Fodor responded to 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 explore big ideas about how we understand the world and think.