Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor ; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017 was an American philosopher as alive as a author of numerous crucial working in a fields of philosophy of mind in addition to cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid a groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on practically every an essential or characteristic part of something abstract. of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." Until his death in 2017 he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University.

Fodor was required for his provocative and sometimes ] He argued that mental states, such(a) as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He continues that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought LOT in the mind. Furthermore, this Linguistic communication 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 kind of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that realise up the language of thought.

For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such(a) 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 freelancer of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other and of the "central processing" factor of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the source of these modules gives the opportunity of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, helps it possible for mental states to cause believe 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.: 73–75 

Although Fodor originally rejected the opinion that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he devoted much of his writing and examine to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the asked asymmetric causal theory of source and his numerous 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 and neo-Darwinian theories of natural selection.

The functional architecture of the mind

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 position emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Historically, questions approximately mental architecture have been divided[] into two contrasting theories about the species of the faculties. The first can be noted as a "horizontal" view because it sees mental processes as interactions between faculties which are not domain specific. For example, a judgment retains a judgment whether it is for judgment about a perceptual experience or a judgment about the apprehension of language. Thecan be refers as a "vertical" view because it claims that our mental faculties are domain specific, genetically determined, associated with distinct neurological structures, and so on.

The vertical vision can be traced back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed that mental faculties could be associated with specific physical areas of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be literally "read off" from the size of a specific bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproved over the course of the last century.

Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became one of the almost vocal proponents of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander, which is the author cited in the references instead, more specifically Hollander's In search of the soul. Two properties of modularity in particular, informational encapsulation and domain specificity, make it possible to tie together questions of functional architecture with those of mental content. The ability to elaborate information independently from the background beliefs of individuals that these two properties allow Fodor to afford an atomistic and causal account of the notion of mental content. The leading idea, in other words, is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, rather than exclusively on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, also on their causal relations with the external world.

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(a) as Henry Plotkin, among many others. But Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" have taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or all other, model.