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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 ...
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 ...
According to this version of the theory, the mental representations were images (often called "ideas") of the objects or states of affairs represented. For modern adherents, such as Jerry Fodor and Steven Pinker, the representational system consists rather of an internal language of thought (i.e., mentalese).
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that ...