Quotes by Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

…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.

Believe

Knowledge

Mind

…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.

Interesting

Knowledge

Law

…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.

Class

Knowledge

Mind

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.

Differences

Mean

Views

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.

Hate

I Hate

Relativism

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.

Doubt

Phds

Philosophy

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.

Process

Syntax

Virtue

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.

Community

Computer

Ifs

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.

Example

Flying

Variables

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

Doctrine

Individualism

Respect

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Bad Day

Bears

Believe

Class

Community

Competition

Computer

Data

Debt

Degrees

Differences

Doctrine

Doe

Doubt

Drawing

Example

Flying

Hands

Hate

I Hate

Ifs

Individualism

Interesting

Kind

Knowledge

Law

May

Mean

Mind

Onions

Parent

Pay

Phds

Philosopher

Philosophical

Philosophy

Process

Relation

Relativism

Respect

Retrospect

Self

Self Pity

Simplicity

Sometimes

Syntax

Taken

Thinking

Two

Variables

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Quotes by Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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