Foreign thinker
Jerry Alan Fodor
Jerry Alan FodorPhilosophy of mind and cognitive scienceAmerican1935–2017
"The mind, like a computer, is a device for processing information."
Life and Thought
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and one of the most prominent figures in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and cognitive science in the second half of the twentieth century. Through his defense of the computational theory of mind and the language of thought hypothesis, he played an important role in the development of contemporary cognitive science.
Jerry Alan Fodor was born in New York in 1935. He studied at Columbia University and Princeton University and spent an important part of his academic career at Rutgers University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was one of the major figures connecting analytic philosophy with cognitive science.
With his 1975 book The Language of Thought, Fodor presented an influential theory about the nature of thinking. According to this view, mental processes are partly like computations over internal symbolic representations, and the mind has a structure similar to an internal language.
In The Modularity of Mind, he argued that some parts of the mind have specialized and relatively independent structures. He also made important contributions to philosophy of language and theories of meaning, intentionality, and mental representation.
In his later work, Fodor criticized approaches such as cognitive Darwinism and overly simple evolutionary explanations of the mind. His works remain important sources in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science.