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Jerry Alan Fodor ( ; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American
philosopher Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
and the author of works in the fields of
philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the Body (biology), body and the Reality, external world. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a ...
and
cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...
. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the
modularity of mind Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may, at least in part, be composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions. However, different definitions of "module" have ...
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 Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
, 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 New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...
on April 22, 1935, and was of
Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
descent. He received his degree (''summa cum laude'') from
Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on
Søren Kierkegaard Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( , ; ; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danes, Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical tex ...
. and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser and Arthur Danto. He then earned a PhD in philosophy from
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
in 1960, under the direction of
Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of ...
. From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the
City University of New York The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...
(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 Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
. Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor followed
opera Opera is a form of History of theatre#European theatre, Western theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by Singing, singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically ...
and regularly wrote columns for the ''
London Review of Books The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews. History The ''London Review of Book ...
'' 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 A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact ...
, such as
belief A belief is a subjective Attitude (psychology), attitude that something is truth, true or a State of affairs (philosophy), state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some Life stance, stance, take, or opinion ...
s 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 The brain is an organ (biology), organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head (cephalization), usually near organs for ...
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 In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...
of the representations that make up the language of thought. For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and
linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
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 Philosophy of language refers to the philosophical study of the nature of language. It investigates the relationship between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of Meaning (philosophy), me ...
because of this problem of the meaning and
reference A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''nam ...
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 Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the Heredity, heritable traits characteristic of a population over generation ...
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 attitude A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent or organism toward a proposition. In philosophy, propositional attitudes can be considered to be neurally realized, causally efficacious, content-bearing internal states (personal princip ...
s, 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
proposition A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false. It is a central concept in the philosophy of language, semantics, logic, and related fields. Propositions are the object s denoted by declarative sentences; for example, "The sky ...
s 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 Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
, 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 The parietal lobe is one of the four Lobes of the brain, major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The parietal lobe is positioned above the temporal lobe and behind the frontal lobe and central sulcus. The parietal lobe integra ...
. 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 A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...
''The Modularity of Mind'', where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander's ''In search of the soul''.Hollander, Bernard (1920). ''In search of the soul: and the mechanism of thought, emotion, and conduct''
Volume 1Volume 2
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co).
Two properties of modularity, ''informational encapsulation'' and ''domain specificity'', make it possible to relate functional architecture to mental content. A person's ability to elaborate information independently from their background beliefs allows Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of mental content. The main idea is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, not just on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, but also on their causal relations with the external world.


Adoption by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists

Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as
Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychology, cognitive psychologist, psycholinguistics, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psycholo ...
and Henry Plotkin. Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" had taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to these researchers, the mind was a long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model. The main reason for this is that most cognition is abductive and global, hence sensitive to all possibly relevant background beliefs to (dis)confirm a belief. This creates the frame problem for the computational theory, because the relevance of a belief is not one of its local, syntactic properties but context-dependent.


Intentional realism

In ''A Theory of Content and Other Essays'' (1990), Fodor takes up another of his central notions: the question of the reality of mental representations. He sought to justify representational realism, so as to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.


Fodor's criticism of Dennett

Fodor starts with some criticisms of so-called ''standard realism''. This view is characterized, according to Fodor, by two distinct assertions. One of these regards the internal structure of mental states and asserts that such states are non-relational. The other concerns the
semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
theory of mental content and asserts that there is an
isomorphism In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping or morphism between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between the ...
between the causal roles of such contents and the inferential web of beliefs. Among modern philosophers of mind, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true. Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second. In particular, Fodor criticizes the instrumentalism of
Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those ...
. Dennett maintains that it is possible to be realist with regard to intentional states without having to commit oneself to the reality of mental representations. Now, according to Fodor, if one remains at this level of analysis, then there is no possibility of explaining ''why'' the intentional strategy works:


Productivity, systematicity and thought


Building on Chomsky

Fodor also has ''positive'' arguments in favour of the reality of mental representations in terms of the LOT. He maintains that if language is the expression of thoughts and language is systematic, then thoughts must also be systematic. Fodor draws on the work of
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
to both model his theory of the mind and to refute alternative architectures such as connectionism. Systematicity in natural languages was explained by Chomsky in terms of two more basic concepts: productivity and compositionality. Productivity is a representational system's unbounded ability to generate new representations from a given set of symbols, using its cognitive architecture. "John", "loves", and "Mary" allow for the construction of the sentences "John loves Mary" and "Mary loves John". Fodor's language of thought theorizes that representations are decomposable into constituent parts, and these decomposed representations are built into new strings. More important than productivity is systematicity since it does not rely on questionable idealizations about human cognition. The argument states that a cognizer is able to understand some sentence in virtue of understanding another. For example, no one who understands "John loves Mary" is unable to understand "Mary loves John", and no one who understands "P and Q" is unable to understand "P". Systematicity itself is rarely challenged as a property of natural languages and logics, but some challenge that thought is systematic in the same way languages are. Still others from the connectionist tradition have tried to build non-classical networks that can account for the apparent systematicity of language. The fact that systematicity and productivity depend on the compositional structure of language means that language has a combinatorial semantics. If thought also has such a
combinatorial Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and as an end to obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many ...
semantics, then, Fodor stated, there must be a language of thought.


Formalizing thought processes

The second argument that Fodor provides in favour of representational realism involves the processes of thought. This argument touches on the relation between the
representational theory of mind A mental representation (or cognitive representation), in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality or its abstractions. Mental repre ...
and models of its architecture. If the sentences of Mentalese require unique processes of elaboration then they require a computational mechanism of a certain type. The syntactic notion of mental representations goes hand in hand with the idea that mental processes are calculations which act only on the ''form'' of the symbols which they elaborate. And this is the computational theory of the mind. Consequently, the defence of a model of architecture based on classic artificial intelligence passes inevitably through a defence of the reality of mental representations. For Fodor, this formal notion of thought processes also has the advantage of highlighting the parallels between the causal role of symbols and the contents which they express. In his view, syntax plays the role of mediation between the causal role of the symbols and their contents. The semantic relations between symbols can be "imitated" by their syntactic relations. The inferential relations which connect the ''contents'' of two symbols can be imitated by the formal syntax rules which regulate the derivation of one symbol from another.


The nature of content

From the beginning of the 1980s, Fodor adhered to a causal notion of mental content and of meaning. This idea of content contrasts sharply with the inferential role semantics to which he subscribed earlier in his career. Fodor went on to criticize inferential role semantics (IRS) because its commitment to an extreme form of
holism Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. Julian Tudor Hart (2010''The Political Economy of Health Care''pp.106, 258 The aphorism "The whole is greater than t ...
excludes the possibility of a true naturalization of the mental. But naturalization must include an explanation of content in atomistic and causal terms.


Anti-holism

Fodor, while following W.V.O. Quine's confirmation holism, criticised semantic holism, the idea that every connection of a concept is part of its meaning. The identity of the content of a mental state, under semantic holism, can only be determined by the ''totality'' of its epistemic bonds. Fodor argued that this makes the realism of mental states an impossibility:


The asymmetric causal theory

Having criticized the idea that semantic evaluation concerns only the internal relations between the units of a symbolic system, Fodor can adopt an externalist position with respect to mental content and meaning. For Fodor, later in his life, the problem of naturalization of the mental is tied to the possibility of giving "the sufficient conditions for which a piece of the world is relative to (expresses, represents, is true of) another piece" in non-intentional and non-semantic terms. If this goal is to be achieved within a representational theory of the mind, then the challenge is to devise a causal theory which can establish the interpretation of the primitive non-logical symbols of the LOT. Fodor's initial proposal is that what determines that the symbol for "water" in Mentalese expresses the property H2O is that the occurrences of that symbol are in certain causal relations with water. The intuitive version of this causal theory is what Fodor calls the "Crude Causal Theory". According to this theory, the occurrences of symbols express the properties which are the causes of their occurrence. The term "horse", for example, says of a horse that it is a horse. In order to do this, it is necessary and sufficient that certain properties of an occurrence of the symbol "horse" be in a law-like relation with certain properties which determine that something is an occurrence of ''horse''. The main problem with this theory is that of erroneous representations. There are two unavoidable problems with the idea that "a symbol expresses a property if it is ... necessary that all and only the presences of such a property cause the occurrences". The first is that not ''all'' horses cause occurrences of ''horse''. The second is that not ''only'' horses cause occurrences of ''horse.'' Sometimes the ''A''(''horses'') are caused by A (horses), but at other times—when, for example, because of the distance or conditions of low visibility, one has confused a cow for a horse—the ''A'' (''horses'') are caused by B (cows). In this case the symbol ''A'' doesn't express just the property A, but the disjunction of properties A or B. The crude causal theory is therefore incapable of distinguishing the case in which the content of a symbol is disjunctive from the case in which it isn't. This gives rise to what Fodor calls the "problem of disjunction". Fodor responds to this problem with what he defines as "a slightly less crude causal theory". According to this approach, it is necessary to break the symmetry at the base of the crude causal theory. Fodor must find some criterion for distinguishing the occurrences of ''A'' caused by As (true) from those caused by Bs (false). The point of departure, according to Fodor, is that while the false cases are '' ontologically dependent'' on the true cases, the reverse is not true. There is an asymmetry of dependence, in other words, between the true contents (''A''= A) and the false ones (''A''=A or B). The first can subsist independently of the second, but the second can occur only because of the existence of the first:


Functionalism

During the 1960s, philosophers such as Donald Davidson,
Hilary Putnam Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, computer scientist, and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of ...
, and Fodor tried to resolve the puzzle of developing a way to preserve the explanatory efficacy of mental causation and
folk psychology Folk psychology, commonsense psychology, or naïve psychology is the ordinary, intuitive, or non-expert understanding, explanation, and rationalization of people's behaviors and Cognitive psychology, mental states. In philosophy of mind and cognit ...
while adhering to a materialist vision of the world which did not violate the "generality of physics". Their proposal was, first of all, to reject the then-dominant theories in philosophy of mind:
behaviorism Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understand the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex elicited by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that indivi ...
and the type identity theory. The problem with logical behaviorism was that it failed to account for causation ''between'' mental states and such causation seems to be essential to psychological explanation, especially if one considers that behavior is not an effect of a single mental event/cause but is rather the effect of a chain of mental events/causes. The type-identity theory, on the other hand, failed to explain the fact that radically different physical systems can find themselves in the identical mental state. Besides being deeply anthropocentric (why should humans be the only thinking organisms in the universe?), the identity-type theory also failed to deal with accumulating evidence in the neurosciences that every single human brain is different from all the others. Hence, the impossibility of referring to common mental states in different physical systems manifests itself not only between different species but also between organisms of the same species. One can solve these problems, according to Fodor, with functionalism, a hypothesis which was designed to overcome the failings of both dualism and
reductionism Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positi ...
. What is important is the function of a mental state regardless of the physical substrate which implements it. The foundation for this view lies in the principle of the multiple realizability of the mental. Under this view, for example, I and a computer can both instantiate ("realize") the same functional state though we are made of completely different material stuff (see graphic at right). On this basis functionalism can be classified as a form of ''token materialism''.


Evolution

Fodor and the biolinguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini co-authored the book '' What Darwin Got Wrong'' (2010). In the same, the authors argue that much neo-Darwinian literature is "distressingly uncritical" and that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution "overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables". Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes this book as "a profoundly misguided critique of natural selection" and "as biologically uninformed as it is strident". Moral philosopher and anti-scientism author Mary Midgley praises ''What Darwin Got Wrong'' as "an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities".


Awards and honors

Fodor was a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
. He received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
), Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research institution at Stanford University designed to advance the frontiers of knowledge about human behavior and society, and contribute to the resoluti ...
, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...
. He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993. His lecture series for the Prize was published as ''The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its
Semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...
'' (1995). In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the John Locke Lectures at the
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
, titled ''Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong'', which went on to become a 1998 book. He also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002) to the
American Philosophical Association The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarl ...
, of whose Eastern Division he served as President (2005–2006). In 2005, he won the Mind & Brain Prize.


Criticism

Philosophers of diverse orientations have challenged many of Fodor's ideas.


Simon Blackburn

Simon Blackburn in ''Spreading the Word'' (1984) has accused the language of thought hypothesis of falling prey to an infinite regress. If a person understands a word like "dog" through a mental representation which indicates that the word denotes dogs, then a regress takes place. Fodor replies that the language of thought does not involve denoting things. On this view, the process of reasoning works directly to give a result but does not allow the person to examine how it works.


Daniel Dennett

In 1981,
Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those ...
formulated another argument against the LOT. Dennett suggested that it would seem, on the basis of the evidence of our behavior toward computers but also with regard to some of our own unconscious behavior, that explicit representation is not necessary for the explanation of propositional attitudes. During a game of chess with a computer program, we often attribute such attitudes to the computer, saying such things as "It thinks that the queen should be moved to the left." We attribute propositional attitudes to the computer and this helps us to explain and predict its behavior in various contexts. Yet no one would suggest that the computer is actually ''thinking'' or ''believing'' somewhere inside its circuits the equivalent of the propositional attitude "I believe I can kick this guy's butt" in Mentalese. The same is obviously true, suggests Dennett, of many of our everyday automatic behaviors such as "desiring to breathe clear air" in a stuffy environment.


Kent Bach

Linguists and philosophers of language such as Kent Bach have criticized Fodor's self-proclaimed "extreme"
concept A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, ...
nativism. Bach takes Fodor to task for his criticisms of lexical semantics and
polysemy Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a Sign (semiotics), sign (e.g. a symbol, morpheme, word, or phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word h ...
. Fodor claims that there is no lexical structure to such verbs as "keep", "get", "make" and "put". He suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP (Fodor capitalizes concepts to distinguish them from properties, names or other such entities). If there is a straightforward one-to-one mapping between individual words and concepts, "keep your clothes on", "keep your receipt" and "keep washing your hands" will all share the same concept of KEEP under Fodor's theory. This concept presumably locks on to the unique external property of keeping. But, if this is true, then RETAIN must pick out a different property in RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT, since one can't retain one's clothes on or retain washing one's hands. Fodor's theory also has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes, ''differently'', to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME. Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of pragmatic inference, is a matter of debate. Fodor's own response to this kind of criticism is expressed bluntly in ''Concepts'': "People sometimes used to say that ''exist'' must be ambiguous because look at the difference between 'chairs exist' and 'numbers exist'. A familiar reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you don't also need 'exist' to be polysemic." Some critics find it difficult to accept Fodor's insistence that a large, perhaps implausible, number of concepts are primitive and undefinable. For example, Fodor considers such concepts as EFFECT, ISLAND, TRAPEZOID, and WEEK to be all primitive, innate and unanalyzable because they all fall into the category of what he calls "lexical concepts" (those for which our language has a single word). Against this view, Bach argues that the concept VIXEN is almost certainly composed out of the concepts FEMALE and FOX, BACHELOR out of SINGLE and MALE, and so on.


Fiona Cowie

In her 1999 book ''What's Within'', Fiona Cowie argued against Fodor's innatist view, preferring a
John Locke John Locke (; 29 August 1632 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.) – 28 October 1704 (Old Style and New Style dates, O.S.)) was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thi ...
-style
empiricism In philosophy, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. It is one of several competing views within epistemology, along ...
. Fodor replied at length in a 1999 article titled "Doing Without ''What's Within''; Fiona Cowie's Critique of Nativism", stating that he was aiming at a position halfway between nativism and empiricism.


Books

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * (edited collection) * * * * *


See also

* Computational theory of mind * Special sciences


References


Sources

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External links


Jerry Fodor's Homepage
(Archived)
Jerry Fodor at the ''London Review of Books''

"Semantics – An Interview with Jerry Fodor"
''ReVEL''. Vol. 5, n. 8 (March 2007).
BloggingHeads dialogue between Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sobermeaningful words without sense, & other revolutions
Interview by Richard Marshall {{DEFAULTSORT:Fodor, Jerry 1935 births 2017 deaths 20th-century American essayists 20th-century American philosophers 21st-century American essayists 21st-century American philosophers 20th-century American Jews Linguists from the United States American male essayists American male non-fiction writers American philosophy academics Analytic philosophers Columbia College (New York) alumni American consciousness researchers and theorists Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Jean Nicod Prize laureates Jewish linguists Jewish philosophers American philosophers of language American philosophers of logic American philosophers of mind Philosophers of psychology American philosophers of social science Presidents of the American Philosophical Association Princeton University alumni Rationalists Rutgers University faculty 21st-century American Jews