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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 ...
Modern nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor (1935–2017), Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), and Steven Pinker (b. 1954), who argue that humans from birth have certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow them to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language.
The phrase was coined by Jerry Fodor at an MIT conference on cognition, at which he referred to another researcher as a "West Coast theorist," apparently unaware that the researcher worked at Yale University. [1] Very few researchers adhere strictly to the extreme positions highlighted by the East Pole–West Pole debate.
These biases are understood as aiding learning and directing attention. Module-like structures are therefore the product of both experience and these innate biases. Neuroconstructivism can therefore be seen as a bridge between Jerry Fodor's psychological nativism and Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Nativism is a modern view rooted in innatism. The advocates of nativism are mainly philosophers who also work in the field of cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics : most notably Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor (although the latter adopted a more critical attitude toward nativism in his later writings).
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 ...
Its corollary, nativism, argues that we are born with certain cognitive modules that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language, (for example the theory of Universal Grammar, the theory that the 'programming' for grammar is hardwired in the brain) and is most associated with the recent work of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and ...
Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science (especially modern cognitive development) that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices. [1]