Jerry Fodor

Quotes

• “If there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me.”
• “I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats... surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.”
• “The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.”
• “[T]he degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system … simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.”

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Key facts

Born

Jerry Alan Fodor , ( 1935 -04-22 ) April 22, 1935, New York City, US

Died

November 29, 2017 (2017-11-29) (aged 82), New York City, US

Awards

Jean Nicod Prize (1993)

Alma mater

Columbia University , Princeton University

Thesis

The Uses of "Use": A Study in the Philosophy of Language (1960)

Doctoral advisor

Hilary Putnam

Other advisor

Sidney Morgenbesser

Era

20th- / 21st-century philosophy

Region

Western philosophy

School

Analytic

Institutions

Rutgers University

Main interests

Philosophy of mind , Philosophy of language , Cognitive science , Rationalism , Cognitivism , Functionalism

Notable ideas

Modularity of mind , Language of thought

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image

Jerry Fodor.jpg

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