Jerry Fodor Quotes

#1. Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.

Jerry Fodor

#2. I rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.

Jerry Fodor

#3. On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

Jerry Fodor

#4. No doubt, intuitions deserve respect ... [but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs ...

Jerry Fodor

#5. I hate relativism . I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats ... surely, surely , no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.

Jerry Fodor

#6. If 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.

Jerry Fodor

#7. The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

Jerry Fodor

#8. I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

Jerry Fodor

#9. Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

Jerry Fodor

#10. The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.

Jerry Fodor