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person1935-2017

Jerry A. Fodor

Disciplines:
philosophy of mind
philosophy/philosophy of language
cognitive science

Summary

American philosopher who defended the language of thought hypothesis — thought occurs in an innate mentalese — and the modularity thesis, arguing that the mind is organized into informationally encapsulated domain-specific modules.

Core Contribution

The Language of Thought: thinking is computation over mental representations with syntactic structure and semantic content — mentalese is innate and universal. Modularity of Mind: the mind contains encapsulated input modules (vision, language processing) plus central cognition. Informational semantics: mental representations get their content from nomic dependencies on distal causes.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Spent the last decade of his life attacking connectionism and statistical learning models of the mind — arguing that holism and context-sensitivity defeat any associationist account of thought.
  • Admitted that he had no good account of how central cognition — inference, belief revision, rational deliberation — works computationally; this he called the frame problem and considered it the hardest problem in cognitive science.
  • Argued that concepts like DOORKNOB are primitive and unanalyzable — denying the classical theory of concepts even for apparently simple cases.

Notable Works & Achievements

The Language of Thought

Modularity of Mind

Psychosemantics

The Elm and the Expert

LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited

Historical Influences

Noam Chomsky Hilary Putnam W. V. O. Quine

Intellectual Lineage

Generative Linguistics Cognitive Science Analytic Philosophy of Mind

Contemporaries & Peers

Noam Chomsky Daniel Dennett David Marr

Minds Influenced

Daniel Dennett Andy Clark Brian Loar

Intellectual Posterity

Language of Thought HypothesisModularity ThesisInformational Semantics

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Jerry A. Fodor

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