Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jerry Fodor

Quote by Jerry Fodor

“If, in short, 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.”

Quote by Jerry Fodor

Author

Jerry Fodor
Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor is a renowned American philosopher known for his contributions to the fields of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. His research focuses on the nature of language, meaning, and cognition, and has had a profound impact on the philosophical community. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”