Quotessence
Home / Authors / Jerry Fodor Books
Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor Books

Philosopher

No books found for this author.

Related Quotes

“Look, suppose you’re an official in the National Science Foundation, and a guy comes to you and says: Listen I have this interesting idea, give me $100,000 and I’ll work on it. And then 50 of the most respected people in the field come up to you and say: Look, the guy’s crazy, that can’t be true. Who are you going to believe? You’re going to end up supporting a very conservative, middle brow scientific institution. It’s hopeless.”

Science Funding
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.”

KindMeanDifferentFactsRememberOrderLanguageDifferencesViewsPsychologyCenturyTypePerceptionPsychologicalFacultySensationsMechanismDifferent KindsImpressedRespectableCognitionDubiousHanging AroundVolition
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingProblemBodyCertainGivenProcessLevelsClassCasesParticularProjectsSolutionsBasesDataAnalysisMechanismRepresentationOrganismsSequenceStimulusInvolvingInputUtteranceOutputInference
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“The 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.”

WholeWould BeBeliefGivenVirtueTakenTheoryDegreesRelationStructurePropertySimplicitySensitiveHypothesisConservatismBelief SystemsConfirmationMetrics
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for fitness than being polygamous... except when there are effects of interacting variables... It's not that the underlying generalizations are there but imperceptible in the ambient noise.”

BigsEffectsExampleLowsFlyingNoiseVariablesInteractingGeneralizationAmbient
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“...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.”

IfsMindKindWould BeLawTurnsNaturalInterestingCommonKnowledgeAccidentsScalesDescriptionCosmicInteresting ThingsMonetaryCommonality
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.”

KnowsWorldShouldMindFirstsLooksReasonPhilosophyFactsTurnsWaitingUnderstandingKnowledgeCasesKnow HowOne ThingBearsStructureHistoricalReason WhyParadoxEmphasisGalaxyHistorical Facts
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image

“To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.”

SaidUseHandsSeemsWantedParentCompanyArgumentMeetingsPhilosopherLawyerExtrasFacultySuggestionsRecollectionRetrospectGood Company
Author:Jerry Fodor
Create image