Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jerry Fodor's language of thought hypothesis, developed in his 1975 book The Language of Thought, holds that mental states such as beliefs and desires involve relations between individuals and mental representations encoded in the brain. These representations form a genuine inner language, which Fodor called Mentalese, and thinking consists of computations operating on the syntax of those representations.
In The Modularity of Mind (1983), Fodor argued that significant parts of the mind, particularly perceptual and linguistic processes, operate as informationally encapsulated modules that are sealed off from a person's general background knowledge. He distinguished these modular processes from the mind's central reasoning systems, which he held are global and not domain-specific.
Fodor was on the faculty at MIT from 1959 to 1986, then served as a full professor at the City University of New York from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 until his retirement in 2016, he held the State of New Jersey Professorship of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where he was named Emeritus.
Fodor's asymmetric causal theory holds that a mental symbol means a property when occurrences of that symbol caused by other properties depend on the true causal link between the symbol and the property it represents, but not vice versa. For example, cows can trigger the horse-symbol only because horses already cause it, but horses would cause it even if cows never did, establishing an asymmetric dependence that distinguishes genuine meaning from error.
Fodor won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993 and the Mind and Brain Prize in 2005. He also held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Oxford, and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argued that neo-Darwinian theory overestimates the role the environment plays in shaping a species' phenotype and correspondingly underestimates endogenous variables. They characterized much of the relevant literature as distressingly uncritical.