Jerry Fodor Quotes

#1. Do not gossip with new coworkers, admit to any insecurities or concerns, complain to them, or solicit too much in the way of guidance (they will peg you as clueless), especially

Kate White

#2. 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

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

Jerry Fodor

#4. 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

#5. Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.

Henry David Thoreau

#6. 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

#7. Opening our home to others is a wonderful gift and a neglected discipline in the church.

Kevin DeYoung

#8. It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Jerry A. Fodor

#9. The truth has a certain validity.

Stu Strumwasser

#10. 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

#11. I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#12. I spend almost every morning with mail.

Seamus Heaney

#13. Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.

Jerry A. Fodor

#14. Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it's clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn't really philosophical to begin with.

Jerry A. Fodor

#15. The sun will rise tomorrow morning; I know that perfectly well. But figuring out how I could know it is, as Hume pointed out, a bit of a puzzle.

Jerry A. Fodor

#16. Shoes for men are about elegance or wealth; they are not playing with the inner character.

Christian Louboutin

#17. If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68)

Jerry A. Fodor

#18. There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You'll regret it if you don't.

Jerry A. Fodor

#19. I shrug. You're a part of me, Olivia. Anything that involves you is always about us.

Veronica Rossi

#20. One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)

Jerry A. Fodor

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Jerry Fodor

#24. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

Brian Dennehy

#25. Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.

Jerry A. Fodor

#26. 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

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

Jerry Fodor