Jerry Fodor

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerry Fodor walked into philosophy at a moment when the mind was considered either a black box of behavioral inputs and outputs, or a tangle of neurons best left to biologists. He disagreed with both camps. Born in New York City on the 22nd of April 1935, Fodor would spend the next eight decades building one of the most ambitious and contested accounts of the human mind ever proposed. By the time of his death in November 2017, one assessment placed his influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960. That is a remarkable reach for a thinker who spent much of his career writing about things most people never consciously notice: how a visual illusion stays convincing even when you know it's wrong, or why it's impossible to understand "John loves Mary" without also grasping "Mary loves John". What drove those observations? And what did Fodor believe they revealed about the inner architecture of thought itself?

• 2. The Making of a Philosopher

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  Fodor graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 1956 after writing a senior thesis on the Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. His teachers there included Sidney Morgenbesser and Arthur Danto, two figures at the center of American philosophical life. He then moved to Princeton University, where he completed his PhD in 1960 under Hilary Putnam, the philosopher who would later become one of his closest intellectual sparring partners. Fodor joined the faculty at MIT in 1959, a year before finishing his doctorate, and he stayed for nearly three decades. That long Cambridge tenure placed him at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy at the exact moment those fields were beginning to reshape each other. He later moved to the City University of New York and then, in 1988, to Rutgers University, where he held the State of New Jersey Professorship of Philosophy until his retirement in 2016. Away from the seminar room, Fodor was a devoted opera fan who contributed regular columns on music and other subjects to the London Review of Books.

• 3. The Language of Thought

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  In 1975, Fodor published The Language of Thought, the book that set the agenda for his career and for much of cognitive science that followed. Its central claim was that mental states such as beliefs and desires are relations between individuals and mental representations. Crucially, those representations are not merely convenient fictions or shorthand for behavior. Fodor insisted they are actually encoded in the brain, forming a genuine language of thought he later called Mentalese. Thinking, on this view, consists of computations operating on the syntax of those representations, much the way a calculator manipulates symbols without caring what those symbols mean. Fodor drew heavily on Noam Chomsky's work to shore up this picture. Chomsky had explained the systematic character of natural languages through productivity and compositionality: the fact that a small set of words like "John", "loves", and "Mary" can be recombined to produce an unbounded number of grammatically distinct sentences. Fodor argued that thought must share this property. If you can understand "John loves Mary", you cannot fail to understand "Mary loves John". No one who grasps "P and Q" is unable to grasp "P" on its own. That systematicity, Fodor held, demands an underlying combinatorial structure, and that structure just is the language of thought.

• 4. Modular Minds

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  The Müller-Lyer illusion is a diagram in which two lines of equal length appear different because of the direction of the arrowheads attached to their ends. Even after you measure the lines and know they are identical, the illusion persists. Fodor treated this stubborn persistence as evidence. Visual estimation, he argued, operates in a module that is sealed off from your background knowledge. In 1983 he published The Modularity of Mind, where he traced the concept back to the 19th-century phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, who had claimed that mental faculties mapped onto specific bumps on the skull. Fodor revived modularity without Gall's simplistic localizability, arguing instead that modules are defined by their causal and functional roles rather than their precise geography in the brain. Two properties were central: informational encapsulation, meaning a module processes its inputs without interference from beliefs held elsewhere in the mind, and domain specificity, meaning each module handles only a defined class of inputs. Perceptual and linguistic processes are modular, Fodor argued. The mind's central reasoning processes, by contrast, are global and not encapsulated. That distinction would later provoke a fierce quarrel with a generation of cognitive scientists who thought Fodor had not gone nearly far enough.

• 5. Battles Over Modularity

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  Cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists including Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin took Fodor's modularity framework and extended it across nearly every cognitive domain, arguing that the mind is massively modular from top to bottom. Fodor was not pleased. He sarcastically labelled their movement "the New Synthesis" and insisted they had taken the idea too far. Most human cognition, he maintained, is abductive and global: it draws on all possibly relevant background beliefs at once to evaluate any given hypothesis. That kind of reasoning creates what philosophers call the frame problem for computational accounts of the mind, because the relevance of a belief is not a local, syntactic property that a module can simply read off. It depends on context, and context is exactly what a sealed module cannot access. The irony was sharp: the man who gave the New Synthesis its conceptual toolkit spent his later years arguing that the toolkit was being misused and that the mind was still a very long way from being explained.

• 6. Meaning, Reference, and the Problem of Error

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  Fodor's later philosophical work circled an old problem with renewed urgency: how can a symbol in the mind actually mean something in the world? His initial answer, which he called the Crude Causal Theory, was deceptively simple. The symbol for "water" in Mentalese expresses the property H2O because occurrences of that symbol stand in lawlike causal relations with water. Horses cause the occurrence of the mental symbol for horse, so that symbol means horse. The trouble is that cows can also cause that symbol to fire, for example when a horse is glimpsed at a distance in poor light and mistaken for a cow. If symbols mean whatever causes them, then the horse-symbol would seem to mean "horse or cow", and error would become impossible to explain. Fodor's resolution, the asymmetric causal theory, hinged on a dependence relation. When cows trigger the horse-symbol because they are mistaken for horses, that false occurrence depends on the existence of the true causal link between horses and the horse-symbol. The reverse does not hold: horses would cause the horse-symbol even in a world where no one ever confused cows with horses. This asymmetry, Fodor argued, is what separates genuine meaning from mere causal coincidence. Fodor also launched sustained attacks on semantic holism, the view that the meaning of any concept is partly constituted by its inferential connections to every other concept. Following W.V.O. Quine's confirmation holism while rejecting his semantic holism, Fodor argued that if meaning is holistic in that way, then no two people can ever share the same intentional state, and psychology becomes impossible.

• 7. Darwin's Critics

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  In 2010, Fodor and the biolinguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini published What Darwin Got Wrong, arguing that neo-Darwinian theory is distressingly uncritical and that Darwin overestimates how much the environment shapes a species' phenotype while underestimating endogenous variables. The response was swift and split. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called the book a profoundly misguided critique and described it as biologically uninformed. Moral philosopher Mary Midgley praised it as an overdue onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities. The book extended a thread that ran through Fodor's entire career: deep skepticism toward reductive, computationally tidy accounts of the mind and its origins. Fodor won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993, and his prize lectures were published as The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics in 1995. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1996-1997 under the title Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, which became a book in 1998. He won the Mind and Brain Prize in 2005 and served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2005 to 2006.