Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.
Life and career
Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He received his degree from Columbia University in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on Søren Kierkegaard and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser and Arthur Danto. He then earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam.From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York. From 1988, until his retirement in 2016 as emeritus, he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University.
Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor followed opera and regularly wrote columns for the London Review of Books on that and other topics. Fodor's first marriage was to the applied psychologist Iris Goldstein, with whom he had one son. After their divorce, he married the linguist Janet Dean. Janet and he lived in Manhattan and had a daughter. He died at home on November 29, 2017.
Philosophical work
Fodor argued in his 1975 book The Language of Thought that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adhered to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.
Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposed reductive accounts of the mind. He argued that mental states are multiple realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses. He also emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterized as the ill-grounded Darwinian theories of natural selection as an explanation of mind.
Fodor and the nature of mental states
Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, Fodor's idea that mental states embodying intentionality, propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires are relational never changed. He attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states. Fodor considers two alternative hypotheses. The first denies the relational character of mental states, while the second considers mental states as two-place relations. The latter position can be further subdivided into the Carnapian view that such relations are between individuals and sentences of natural languages, and the Fregean view that they are between individuals and the propositions expressed by such sentences. Fodor's own position, instead, is that to properly account for the nature of intentional attitudes, it is necessary to employ a three-place relation between individuals, representations and propositional contents.Considering mental states as three-place relations in this way, representative realism makes it possible to hold together all of the elements necessary to the solution of this problem. Further, mental representations are not only the objects of beliefs and desires, but are also the domain over which mental processes operate. They can be considered the ideal link between the syntactic notion of mental content and the computational notion of functional architecture. These notions are, according to Fodor, our best explanation of mental processes.
Functional architecture of the mind
Psychological nativism and modularity
Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms led him to formulate his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.Fodor noted the evidence from perceptual errors like the Müller-Lyer illusion that processes such as visually estimating the length of a line are not interfered with by the knowledge that the two lines are actually the same length. He took this to mean that the visual processes were in a separate module from knowledge.
File:PhrenologyPix.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|The idea of modularity of mind was presaged by Franz Joseph Gall's 19th century phrenology movement.
The idea can be traced back to the 19th century phrenology movement. Its founder Franz Joseph Gall claimed that mental faculties were associated with specific regions of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproven in the 20th century.
Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became a vocal proponent of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander's In search of the soul. Two properties of modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity, make it possible to relate functional architecture to mental content. A person's ability to elaborate information independently from their background beliefs allows Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of mental content. The main idea is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, not just on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, but also on their causal relations with the external world.
Adoption by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists
Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin. Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" had taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to these researchers, the mind was a long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model. The main reason for this is that most cognition is abductive and global, hence sensitive to all possibly relevant background beliefs to confirm a belief. This creates the frame problem for the computational theory, because the relevance of a belief is not one of its local, syntactic properties but context-dependent.Intentional realism
In A Theory of Content and Other Essays, Fodor takes up another of his central notions: the question of the reality of mental representations. He sought to justify representational realism, so as to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.Fodor's criticism of Dennett
Fodor starts with some criticisms of so-called standard realism. This view is characterized, according to Fodor, by two distinct assertions. One of these regards the internal structure of mental states and asserts that such states are non-relational. The other concerns the semantic theory of mental content and asserts that there is an isomorphism between the causal roles of such contents and the inferential web of beliefs. Among modern philosophers of mind, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true. Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second.In particular, Fodor criticizes the instrumentalism of Daniel Dennett. Dennett maintains that it is possible to be realist with regard to intentional states without having to commit oneself to the reality of mental representations. Now, according to Fodor, if one remains at this level of analysis, then there is no possibility of explaining why the intentional strategy works: