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Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, [2] 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 [ 3 ] and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser , and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of ...
Fodor defines methodological solipsism as the extreme position that states that the content of someone's beliefs about, say, water has absolutely nothing to do with the substance water in the outside world, nor with the commonly accepted definition of the society in which that person lives. Everything is determined internally.
Jerry Fodor himself argues that the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational theory of mind. The main reason for this shortcoming is that most cognition is abductive and global, hence sensitive to all possibly relevant background beliefs to (dis)confirm a belief.
Jerry Fodor, among others, [14] argues that folk psychology is, in fact, a successful (even indispensable) theory. Another view is that eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and other entities it seeks to "eliminate" and is thus self-refuting.
In the 1980s, however, Jerry Fodor revived the idea of the modularity of mind, although without the notion of precise physical localizability. Drawing from Noam Chomsky's idea of the language acquisition device and other work in linguistics as well as from the philosophy of mind and the implications of optical illusions, he became a major proponent of the idea with the 1983 publication of ...
The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), [1] sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), [2] is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure (sometimes known as ...
Such a position is represented, for example, by Jerry Fodor's account of an "asymmetric causal theory" of mental content. This view simply entails the modification of functionalism to include within its scope a very broad interpretation of inputs and outputs to include the objects that are the causes of mental representations in the external world.
Jerry Fodor argues that non-basic (or "special") sciences do not in fact require strict laws . In current practice, special sciences (for example, biology and chemistry) have ceteris paribus laws (or laws with "all else being equal" clauses), according to which there are exceptions. However, only in the basic sciences (physics) are there strict ...