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Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong
The renowned philosopher Jerry Fodor, a leading figure in the study of the mind for more than twenty years, presents a strikingly original theory on the basic constituents of thought. He suggests that the heart of cognitive science is its theory of concepts, and that cognitive scientists have gone badly wrong in many areas because their assumptions about concepts have been mistaken. Fodor argues compellingly for an atomistic theory of concepts, deals out witty and pugnacious demolitions of rival theories, and suggests that future work on human cognition should build upon new foundations.
This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford Cognitive Science Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitive science will never be the same again.
This lively, conversational, and superbly accessible book is the first volume in the Oxford Cognitive Science Series, where the best original work in this field will be presented to a broad readership. Concepts will fascinate anyone interested in contemporary work on mind and language. Cognitive science will never be the same again.
188 pages, Paperback
First published February 5, 1998
About the author
Jerry A. Fodor
28 books90 followersJerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is also the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. Fodor is of Jewish descent.
Fodor argues that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintains that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Further, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adheres to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.
For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which are defined by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.
Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, he has in recent years devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposes reductive accounts of the mind. He argues that mental states are multiply realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses.
Fodor argues that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintains that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Further, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adheres to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.
For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which are defined by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.
Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, he has in recent years devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposes reductive accounts of the mind. He argues that mental states are multiply realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 27, 2010
I enjoyed this just because it was so immensely infuriating at times. The title seemed controversial but Fodor doesn't explain how cognitive science went wrong so much as he points out what it just has yet to explain. His criticisms of existing theories of concepts were solid and actually rather entertaining, his own theory of concepts was decidedly not. Not necessarily because I don't believe it but because it was just as incomplete as any other theory. I suppose it makes for a stepping stone in a different direction though. What was re-affirming for me was finding that I cannot fathom a kindly balance between science and philosophy and that to have them explain one another is a process that feels rather primitive.
January 30, 2026
i'm not so much convinced by this as excited at what he could get away with. this is a brilliant, brief book that also manages to be a document of twentieth century american style. an incredible, hilarious kind of seduction
December 1, 2022
In his debate with Jackendoff in ch. 3, Fodor argues against the idea that the semantic difference between Susan kept the money and Susan kept the crowd happy, a difference between to keep having and to keep being, arises from the polysemous nature of KEEP. Fodor argues that the difference between the two sentences is the same as the one between Susan kept having the money and Susan kept the crowd being happy, and goes on to argue that this makes having and being, not keep, the difference-makers. In other words, the difference would be structural, not lexical.
Fodor’s idea seems to be: KEEP could have a lexical meaning that generalizes over the distinction between to keep having and to keep being: something like to keep—and not λxλy[cause(continue(y,x))]. The distinction comes, not from the lexical meaning of KEEP, but from somewhere else: perhaps from argument structure differences related to keep’s structural role in the syntax, but not to its semantics. Its semantics is ipso facto whatever all the keep-phrases have in common. “In effect, what I’m selling is a disquotational lexicon” (Fodor 1998: 55).
Fodor’s position is quite strong, stronger than it seems. If you appeal to intransitive uses of transitive verbs as evidence for polysemy (intransitive eat as dine: see Chomsky 1986: 8–9), Fodor can reply that, semantically, such verbs have an implicit complement; John ate ‘really means’ John ate something. Maybe John ate cannot be uttered felicitously if John ate gravel, unlike John ate something, but Fodor may point out that this is a pragmatic, not a semantic difference. If you reply that there is no syntactic motivation for positing the complement, Fodor can reply that he means implicit argument in a purely semantic sense (in agreement with Jackendoff 1987: 409, ironically; see Bhatt & Pancheva 2017 for a review). And if you use standard contextualist examples like color adjectives to claim that red doesn’t mean the same in red pen, red meat and red apple, Fodor can reply that you are begging the question, and that the truth-conditional difference-maker in these NPs is just the head noun.
(Never forget that RED is a name for what “the concept red” refers to, not a structural description of it. It would be surprising otherwise, since Fodor claims that a concept has no internal structure, so there is nothing to describe).
The argument about adjectives resurfaces in Fodor’s polemic with prototype theories of concepts (ch. 5): Kamp & Partee (1995) suggested that you could treat PET FISH or RED APPLE as compositional and save prototypicality by feeding into the mode of combination a recalibrated or appropriately weighted concept of PET or RED (respectively), that applies to FISH and APPLE (respectively). Fodor’s objection to that is that a recalibrated concept would have to be learned from the world by searching the reference set of pet fishes and red apples, in a way that presupposes a compositional analysis that does not deal with the constituent concepts’ prototypes, but with their logical form: a RED APPLE is both RED and an APPLE. If you didn’t know that, you would not search the set of red apples to recalibrate your RED appropriately. At best, then, prototype-friendly compositionality rides piggyback on classical compositionality. “The long and short: either concepts qua prototypes aren’t compositional or, if they are, their compositionality is parasitic upon concepts qua something other than prototypes.” (p. 105).
The reply to that is that one learns what fishes people usually keep as pets, and that the motivation for looking for kinds of fishes, not kinds of pets (or kinds of apples rather than of red things), comes from a syntactic analysis of pet fish where pet modifies fish rather than the other way around (see Jackendoff 2022: fn. 11).
There is a more biting criticism from Robbins (2002). First, it is not the case that strict compositionality obtains in all cases of concept combination: there is the exception of idiomatic constructions (a RED HERRING is neither RED nor a HERRING) and that of free lexical compounding (a TOPLESS BAR is a BAR, but it cannot be grasped by combining TOPLESS and BAR concepts). Second, it is not the case that prototypes fail to compose in indefinitely many cases: in other words, the generative power of prototype models has not been ruled out simply because of exceptions like PET FISH, since the frequency and systematicity of such exceptions has not been established (they could be rare, and Hampton 1988 suggests they are). One principled reason to think that prototypes systematically fail to compose is that statistical profiles are rarely independent, but this is not a good reason, since prototypes are representations of statistical regularities, and, for better or worse, people seem to represent categories that are in fact statistically interdependent as independent (Robbins 2002: 325). See also Prinz (2012) for criticisms of Fodor’s attack on prototype theories of concepts.
I thought the last chapters were quite boring. I also don't think that the arguments against Pinker are very convincing, because I don't think it is difficult to imagine how infants could perceive AGENCY and the other primitives Pinker helps himself to.
Fodor’s idea seems to be: KEEP could have a lexical meaning that generalizes over the distinction between to keep having and to keep being: something like to keep—and not λxλy[cause(continue(y,x))]. The distinction comes, not from the lexical meaning of KEEP, but from somewhere else: perhaps from argument structure differences related to keep’s structural role in the syntax, but not to its semantics. Its semantics is ipso facto whatever all the keep-phrases have in common. “In effect, what I’m selling is a disquotational lexicon” (Fodor 1998: 55).
Fodor’s position is quite strong, stronger than it seems. If you appeal to intransitive uses of transitive verbs as evidence for polysemy (intransitive eat as dine: see Chomsky 1986: 8–9), Fodor can reply that, semantically, such verbs have an implicit complement; John ate ‘really means’ John ate something. Maybe John ate cannot be uttered felicitously if John ate gravel, unlike John ate something, but Fodor may point out that this is a pragmatic, not a semantic difference. If you reply that there is no syntactic motivation for positing the complement, Fodor can reply that he means implicit argument in a purely semantic sense (in agreement with Jackendoff 1987: 409, ironically; see Bhatt & Pancheva 2017 for a review). And if you use standard contextualist examples like color adjectives to claim that red doesn’t mean the same in red pen, red meat and red apple, Fodor can reply that you are begging the question, and that the truth-conditional difference-maker in these NPs is just the head noun.
(Never forget that RED is a name for what “the concept red” refers to, not a structural description of it. It would be surprising otherwise, since Fodor claims that a concept has no internal structure, so there is nothing to describe).
The argument about adjectives resurfaces in Fodor’s polemic with prototype theories of concepts (ch. 5): Kamp & Partee (1995) suggested that you could treat PET FISH or RED APPLE as compositional and save prototypicality by feeding into the mode of combination a recalibrated or appropriately weighted concept of PET or RED (respectively), that applies to FISH and APPLE (respectively). Fodor’s objection to that is that a recalibrated concept would have to be learned from the world by searching the reference set of pet fishes and red apples, in a way that presupposes a compositional analysis that does not deal with the constituent concepts’ prototypes, but with their logical form: a RED APPLE is both RED and an APPLE. If you didn’t know that, you would not search the set of red apples to recalibrate your RED appropriately. At best, then, prototype-friendly compositionality rides piggyback on classical compositionality. “The long and short: either concepts qua prototypes aren’t compositional or, if they are, their compositionality is parasitic upon concepts qua something other than prototypes.” (p. 105).
The reply to that is that one learns what fishes people usually keep as pets, and that the motivation for looking for kinds of fishes, not kinds of pets (or kinds of apples rather than of red things), comes from a syntactic analysis of pet fish where pet modifies fish rather than the other way around (see Jackendoff 2022: fn. 11).
There is a more biting criticism from Robbins (2002). First, it is not the case that strict compositionality obtains in all cases of concept combination: there is the exception of idiomatic constructions (a RED HERRING is neither RED nor a HERRING) and that of free lexical compounding (a TOPLESS BAR is a BAR, but it cannot be grasped by combining TOPLESS and BAR concepts). Second, it is not the case that prototypes fail to compose in indefinitely many cases: in other words, the generative power of prototype models has not been ruled out simply because of exceptions like PET FISH, since the frequency and systematicity of such exceptions has not been established (they could be rare, and Hampton 1988 suggests they are). One principled reason to think that prototypes systematically fail to compose is that statistical profiles are rarely independent, but this is not a good reason, since prototypes are representations of statistical regularities, and, for better or worse, people seem to represent categories that are in fact statistically interdependent as independent (Robbins 2002: 325). See also Prinz (2012) for criticisms of Fodor’s attack on prototype theories of concepts.
I thought the last chapters were quite boring. I also don't think that the arguments against Pinker are very convincing, because I don't think it is difficult to imagine how infants could perceive AGENCY and the other primitives Pinker helps himself to.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews