Jerry A. Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor ( ; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. 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." 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.

Life and career

Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He received his degree (''summa cum laude'') from Columbia University in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on Søren Kierkegaard. and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser and Arthur Danto. He 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. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). From 1988, until his retirement in 2016 as emeritus, he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University.

Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor followed opera and regularly wrote columns for the ''London Review of Books'' on that and other topics. Fodor's first marriage was to the applied psychologist Iris Goldstein, with whom he had one son. After their divorce, he married the linguist Janet Dean. Janet and he lived in Manhattan and had a daughter. He died at home on November 29, 2017.

Philosophical work

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. 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 theories of natural selection as an explanation of mind.

Fodor and the nature of mental states

Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, Fodor's idea that mental states embodying intentionality, propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires are relational never changed. 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 denies the relational character of mental states, while 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.

Functional architecture of the mind

Psychological nativism and modularity

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 emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms led him to formulate his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Fodor noted the evidence from perceptual errors like the Müller-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. He took this to mean that the visual processes were in a separate module from knowledge.

The idea can be traced back to the 19th century phrenology movement. Its founder Franz Joseph Gall claimed that mental faculties were associated with specific regions of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproven in the 20th century.

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

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