Fodor Quotes

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect ... [but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs ... ~ Jerry Fodor

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70) ~ Jerry A. Fodor

In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

If it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying ... If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it's the end of the world. ~ Jerry Fodor

The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts. ~ Jerry Fodor

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

[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. ~ Jerry Fodor

Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation- e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data. ~ Jerry Fodor

There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You'll regret it if you don't. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

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. ~ Jerry Fodor

On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for. ~ Jerry Fodor

There are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds. ~ Jerry Fodor

I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy. ~ Jerry Fodor

As Uncle Hegel used to enjoy pointing out, the trouble with perspectives is that they are, by definition, PARTIAL points of view; the Real problems are appreciated only when, in the course of the development of the World Spirit, the limits of perspective come to be transcended. Or, to put it less technically, it helps to be able to see the whole elephant. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

The issue Fodor writes about is central to the psychology of perception, cognition, and action. It is the central issue for anyone who would seriously study the neurobiology of behavior: Is the mind organized horizontally or vertically or both, and what are the consequences to psychology of proceeding on one assumption or the other? This has been little analyzed and written about. Jerry Fodor has repaired that omission and had done it brilliantly. ~ Alvin Liberman

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. ~ Jerry Fodor

The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads. ~ Jerry Fodor

If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68) ~ Jerry A. Fodor

Monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interesting about monetary exchanges is surely not their commonalities under physical description. A natural kind like a monetary exchange could turn out to be co-extensive with a physical natural kind; but if it did, that would be an accident on a cosmic scale. ~ Jerry Fodor

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations. ~ Jerry Fodor

Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers. ~ Jerry Fodor

The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know. ~ Jerry Fodor