Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (/ˈfoʊdər/ FOH-dər; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science.[1] 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."[1] 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.
Jerry Fodor
April 22, 1935
November 29, 2017 (aged 82)
Jean Nicod Prize (1993)
The Uses of "Use": A Study in the Philosophy of Language (1960)
Early life and education[edit]
Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935,[2] and was of Jewish descent. He received his A.B. degree (summa cum laude) from Columbia University in 1956, where he wrote a senior thesis on Søren Kierkegaard[3] and studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam.
Academic career[edit]
From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). From 1988 until his retirement in 2016 he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he was emeritus.[4][5] Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor passionately followed opera and regularly wrote popular columns for the London Review of Books on that and other topics.[6]
Awards and honors[edit]
Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (Princeton University), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (University of Oxford), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.[40] He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993.[41] His lecture series for the Prize, later published as a book by MIT Press in 1995, was titled The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics.[42] In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, titled Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, which went on to become his 1998 Oxford University Press book of the same name.[43] He has also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002)[44] to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he has served as Vice President (2004–2005) and President (2005–2006).[45] In 2005, he won the Mind & Brain Prize.[46]
Criticism[edit]
A wide variety of philosophers of diverse orientations have challenged many of Fodor's ideas. For example, the language of thought hypothesis has been accused of either falling prey to an infinite regress or of being superfluous. Specifically, Simon Blackburn suggested in an article in 1984 that since Fodor explains the learning of natural languages as a process of formation and confirmation of hypotheses in the LOT, this leaves him open to the question of why the LOT itself should not be considered as just such a language which requires yet another and more fundamental representational substrate in which to form and confirm hypotheses so that the LOT itself can be learned. If natural language learning requires some representational substrate (the LOT) in order for it to be learned, why shouldn't the same be said for the LOT itself and then for the representational substrate of this representational substrate and so on, ad infinitum? On the other hand, if such a representational substrate is not required for the LOT, then why should it be required for the learning of natural languages? In this case, the LOT would be superfluous.[47] Fodor, in response, argues that the LOT is unique in that it does not have to be learned via an antecedent language because it is innate.
In 1981, Daniel Dennett had formulated another argument against the LOT. Dennett suggested that it would seem, on the basis of the evidence of our behavior toward computers but also with regard to some of our own unconscious behavior, that explicit representation is not necessary for the explanation of propositional attitudes. During a game of chess with a computer program, we often attribute such attitudes to the computer, saying such things as "It thinks that the queen should be moved to the left." We attribute propositional attitudes to the computer and this helps us to explain and predict its behavior in various contexts. Yet no one would suggest that the computer is actually thinking or believing somewhere inside its circuits the equivalent of the propositional attitude "I believe I can kick this guy's butt" in Mentalese. The same is obviously true, suggests Dennett, of many of our everyday automatic behaviors such as "desiring to breathe clear air" in a stuffy environment.[48]
Some linguists and philosophers of language have criticized Fodor's self-proclaimed "extreme" concept nativism. Kent Bach, for example, takes Fodor to task for his criticisms of lexical semantics and polysemy. Fodor claims that there is no lexical structure to such verbs as "keep", "get", "make" and "put". He suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP (Fodor capitalizes concepts to distinguish them from properties, names or other such entities). If there is a straightforward one-to-one mapping between individual words and concepts, "keep your clothes on", "keep your receipt" and "keep washing your hands" will all share the same concept of KEEP under Fodor's theory. This concept presumably locks on to the unique external property of keeping. But, if this is true, then RETAIN must pick out a different property in RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT, since one can't retain one's clothes on or retain washing one's hands. Fodor's theory also has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes, differently, to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME.[49] Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of pragmatic inference, is a matter of debate.[50] Fodor's own response to this kind of criticism is expressed bluntly in Concepts: "People sometimes used to say that exist must be ambiguous because look at the difference between 'chairs exist' and 'numbers exist'. A familiar reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you don't also need 'exist' to be polysemic."[51]: 54
Some critics find it difficult to accept Fodor's insistence that a large, perhaps implausible, number of concepts are primitive and undefinable. For example, Fodor considers such concepts as EFFECT, ISLAND, TRAPEZOID, and WEEK to be all primitive, innate and unanalyzable because they all fall into the category of what he calls "lexical concepts" (those for which our language has a single word). Against this view, Bach argues that the concept VIXEN is almost certainly composed out of the concepts FEMALE and FOX, BACHELOR out of SINGLE and MALE, and so on.[49]
Personal life and death[edit]
Fodor lived in Manhattan with his wife, the linguist Janet Dean Fodor, and had two children. Fodor died at home on November 29, 2017.[52]