Quotes by Jerry Fodor - Page 1

Self-pity can make one weep, as can onions.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Onions
Self
Self Pity
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On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Bad Day
Philosopher
Sometimes
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Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Competition
Two
Winning
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Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Debt
Drawing
Pay
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Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Respect
Doctrine
Individualism
Psychological
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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 / Philosopher
Bears
Data
May
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If, in short, 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 / Philosopher
Community
Computer
Ifs
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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 / Philosopher
Relation
Way
World
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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 / Philosopher
Doubt
Philosophical
Thinking
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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 / Philosopher
Hate
I Hate
Relativism
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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 / Philosopher
Doubt
Phds
Philosophy
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The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Doe
Kind
Virtue
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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 / Philosopher
Process
Syntax
Virtue
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...if it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . If none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it's the end of the world.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Journey
Knowledge
Believe
Mind
World
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...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Knowledge
Class
Mind
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The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Degrees
Simplicity
Taken
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...monetary exchanges have interesting things in common; Gresham's law, if true, says what one of these interesting things is. But what is interesting about monetary exchanges is surely not their commonalities under physical description. A natural kind like a monetary exchange could turn out to be co-extensive with a physical natural kind; but if it did, that would be an accident on a cosmic scale.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Knowledge
Interesting
Law
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To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we do get to go to as many faculty meetings as we like at no extra charge.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Hands
Parent
Retrospect
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There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works. That's no paradox. Understanding the structure of galaxies is one thing, understanding how we understand the structure of galaxies is quite another. There isn't the slightest reason why the first should wait on the second and, in point of historical fact, it didn't. This bears a lot of emphasis; it turns up in philosophy practically everywhere you look.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Knowledge
Philosophy
Waiting
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It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for fitness than being polygamous... except when there are effects of interacting variables... It's not that the underlying generalizations are there but imperceptible in the ambient noise.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Example
Flying
Variables
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Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Differences
Mean
Views
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Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of nondemonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hyputheses on the basis of a certain body of data.
Jerry Fodor / Philosopher
Class
Data
Thinking
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