Jerry A. Fodor > Quotes

“Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.”
― Jerry A. Fodor

“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

“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, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“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, RePresentations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science

“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

“As Uncle Hegel used to enjoy pointing out, the trouble with perspectives is that they are, by definition, PARTIAL points of view; the Real problems are appreciated only when, in the course of the development of the World Spirit, the limits of perspective come to be transcended. Or, to put it less technically, it helps to be able to see the whole elephant.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind

“I don't have any friends in English Departments.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong

“This is not a book about God; nor about intelligent design; nor about creationism. Neither of us is into any of those. We thought we’d best make that clear from the outset, because our main contention in what follows will be that there is something wrong–quite possibly fatally wrong–with the theory of natural selection; and we are aware that, even among those who are not quite sure what it is, allegiance to Darwinism has become a litmus for deciding who does, and who does not, hold a ‘properly scientific’ world view. ‘You must choose between faith in God and faith in Darwin; and if you want to be a secular humanist, you’d better choose the latter’. So we’re told.”
― Jerry Fodor, What Darwin Got Wrong

“In the philosophy of mind - as, indeed, in more important matters - [the twentieth century] has been a less than fully satisfactory century. We pretty much wasted the first half, so it seems to me, in a neurotic and obsessive preoccupation with refuting Cartesian skepticism about other minds. In the event, it didn't matter that the skeptics weren't refuted since there turned out not to be any. The only philosophers who really were doubtful about the existence of other minds were relentless anti-Cartesians like Wittgenstein, Dewey, Ryle, Quine and Rorty, and they were equally doubtful about the existence of their own. What we got for our efforts was mostly decades of behaviorism and the persistent bad habit of trying to run epistemological or semantic arguments for metaphysical conclusions. The end of this, I fear, is still not with us.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.”
― Jerry A. Fodor

“One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)”
― Jerry Fodor

“Why isn’t every basic law a miracle by definition?”
― Jerry Fodor

“Light bulbs are very, VERY complicated.”
― Jerry Fodor

“People think they want to know. Actually, if you ask—-how much would you pay to know, the answer is not much. . . . Do you care how your refrigerator works? No, as long as there’s a repairman around when it breaks down. Nobody really cares.”
― Jerry A. Fodor

“It cannot be an objection to a theory that there are some distinctions it does not make; if it were, it would be an objection to every theory. (Aristotelians thought that it was an argument against the Galelean mechanics that it did not distinguish between sublunary and heavenly bodies; i.e., that its generalizations were defined for both. This line of argument is now widely held to have been ill-advised.)”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought

“One man's affirmation of the consecuent is another's man inference to the best explanation (Psychosemantics, pp. 149)”
― Jerry Fodor

“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 Fodor

“The correlation between elms and the botanist's elm thoughts was hard earned; think of all the dreary years he must have spent in graduate school learning to be a reliable elm-detector. Whereas I can now correlate my thoughts with elms practically instantaneously: My mind-world correlation co-opts his [insofar as I use his expertise to identify elms], much as, in the other case, the correlation between my acid thoughts and acids co-opts the correlation between acidity and the color of litmus. What philosophers call 'linguistic deference' is actually the use of experts as instruments; not Marxist division of labor in semantics but capitalist exploitation in epistemology.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics

“Look, suppose you’re an official in the National Science Foundation, and a guy comes to you and says: Listen I have this interesting idea, give me $100,000 and I’ll work on it. And then 50 of the most respected people in the field come up to you and say: Look, the guy’s crazy, that can’t be true. Who are you going to believe? You’re going to end up supporting a very conservative, middle brow scientific institution. It’s hopeless.”
― Jerry Fodor

“You could perfectly well have a machine whose function is to produce things that are themselves functionless. In a consumer society you might have quite a lot of these.”
― Jerry Fodor

“Empiricism isn't true, and it is time to put away childish things.”
― Jerry Fodor

“My point... is of course not that solipsism is true; it's just that truth, reference, and the rest of the semantic notions aren't psychological categories. What they are is: they're modes of Dasein. I don't know what Dasein is, but I'm sure that there's lots of it around, and I'm sure that you and I and Cincinnati have all got it. What more do you want?”
― Jerry A. Fodor, RePresentations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science

“For Helen Keller, it was not visual perception that sustained the meaning-making dog-DOG relation. Yet she and I, each in our way, can both satisfy the conditions for DOG-possession according to the present [rationalist] account of those conditions.”
― Jerry Fodor

“Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world. Accordingly, knowing-that is prior to knowing-how. Descartes was right and Ryle was wrong. Why, after all these years, does one still have to say these things?”
― Jerry Fodor

“Pinker quotes Chomsky’s remark that ‘ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries’ and continues: ‘I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)’ Well, cheerfulness sells books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: ‘the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.”
― Jerry Fodor

“Ontological priority is normatively neutral, Plato to the contrary notwithstanding.”
― Jerry A. Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays