Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What college did Jerry Alan Fodor attend?
Garcia attended Gilroy High School in Gilroy, California, and was a letterman in football and basketball. As a senior at Gilroy High, Garcia was a South Santa Clara County selection for the Charlie Wedemeyer All-Star Football Game and played defensive back in the game.[3] After graduating from Gilroy in 1988, Garcia attended Gavilan College, a local junior college. He was the starting quarterback on the football team for the 1989 season, in which he passed 2,038 yards for 18 touchdowns and rushed 584 yards for four touchdowns. After the season, Garcia earned junior college honorable mention All-America honors.[4]
Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He received his A.B. degree ("summa cum laude") from Columbia University in 1956, where he studied with Sydney Morgenbesser, and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam. From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). From 1988 until his retirement in 2016 he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he was emeritus. Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor passionately followed opera and regularly wrote popular columns for the "London Review of Books" on that and other topics.
In "A Theory of Content and Other Essays" (1990), Fodor takes up another of his central notions: the question of the reality of mental representations. Fodor needs to justify representational realism to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.
Fodor responds to this problem with what he defines as "a slightly less crude causal theory". According to this approach, it is necessary to break the symmetry at the base of the crude causal theory. Fodor must find some criterion for distinguishing the occurrences of "A" caused by As (true) from those caused by Bs (false). The point of departure, according to Fodor, is that while the false cases are "ontologically dependent" on the true cases, the reverse is not true. There is an asymmetry of dependence, in other words, between the true contents ("A"= A) and the false ones ("A" = A or B). The first can subsist independently of the second, but the second can occur only because of the existence of the first:From the point of view of semantics, errors must be "accidents": if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse". Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does "not" depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...
Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he 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 opposed reductive accounts of the mind. He argued that mental states are multiple 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. He also emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterized as the ill-grounded Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of natural selection.
Fodor (who is a close friend) is a gentle man inside a burly body, and prone to an even burlier style of arguing. He is shy and voluble at the same time ... a formidable polemicist burdened with a sensitive soul... Disagreeing with Jerry on a philosophical issue, especially one dear to his heart, can be a chastening experience... His quickness of mind, inventiveness, and sharp wit are not to be tangled with before your first cup of coffee in the morning. Adding Jerry Fodor to the faculty at Rutgers [University] instantly put it on the map, Fodor being by common consent "the leading philosopher of mind" in the world today. I had met him in England in the seventies and ... found him to be the genuine article, intellectually speaking (though we do not always see eye to eye).
Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (Princeton University), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (University of Oxford), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993. His lecture series for the Prize, later published as a book by MIT Press in 1995, was titled "The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics". In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, titled "Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong", which went on to become his 1998 Oxford University Press book of the same name. He has also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002) to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he has served as Vice President (2004–2005) and President (2005–2006). In 2005, he won the Mind & Brain Prize.
In February 2011, Godfrey-Smith (then a Professor at Harvard) interrupted a talk given by Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Jerry Fodor at the "Debating Darwin" philosophy conference held at University of California, Santa Barbara. In the heated exchange that followed, parts of which were captured on video, Godfrey-Smith attempted to challenge Fodor on his views on the theoretical veracity of evolution by natural selection. He had already been critical of Fodor prior to the conference. Godfrey-Smith left Harvard a few months after the incident.
For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines 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.
Fodor starts with some criticisms of so-called "standard realism". This view is characterized, according to Fodor, by two distinct assertions. One of these regards the internal structure of mental states and asserts that such states are non-relational. The other concerns the semantic theory of mental content and asserts that there is an isomorphism between the causal roles of such contents and the inferential web of beliefs. Among modern philosophers of mind, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true. Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second.
Fodor also has "positive" arguments in favour of the reality of mental representations in terms of the LOT. He maintains that if language is the expression of thoughts and language is systematic, then thoughts must also be systematic. Fodor draws on the work of Noam Chomsky to both model his theory of the mind and to refute alternative architectures such as connectionism. Systematicity in natural languages was explained by Chomsky in terms of two more basic concepts: productivity and compositionality.
Fodor co-authored the book "What Darwin Got Wrong" (2010) with the biolinguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in which they describe neo-Darwinists as being "distressingly uncritical" and say of Darwin's theory of evolution that "it overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables." Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes this book as "a profoundly misguided critique of natural selection" and "as biologically uninformed as it is strident". Moral philosopher and anti-scientism author Mary Midgley praises "What Darwin Got Wrong" as "an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities". The book also received positive review by mathematician and Intelligent Design Theorist William Dembski.
Margolis has extensively criticized what he sees as scientism in philosophy, singling out thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and Daniel Dennett as modern-day defenders of invariance.
In his article "Propositional Attitudes" (1978), Fodor introduced the idea that mental states are relations between individuals and mental representations. Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, the idea that intentional attitudes are relational has remained unchanged from its original formulation up to .
Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this position emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.
Philosopher Colin McGinn, who taught with Fodor at Rutgers, described him in these words:
Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."
What Darwin Got Wrong is a 2010 book by philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, in which the authors criticize Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. It is an extension of an argument first presented as "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings" in the "London Review of Books".
Fodor is the daughter of the cognitive scientist and philosopher Jerry Fodor and the linguist Janet Dean Fodor. Her husband is theater and television actor Michael Gaston. Fodor has a daughter named Lucy, born in 2005, to whom she dedicated the published version of her comedy Rx, calling her "the funniest person I know."
Fodor argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adhered 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.
Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, among many others. But Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" have taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.
In 2000, Fodor joined the former Romanian rock band Krypton. Formed in 1983, Krypton was more noted for its heavy metal style of rock. With Fodor on vocals, the band shifted from heavy metal to a more rock/pop orientation. The result was immediate commercial success in the Romanian music market. The CD album "Comercial", released in 2001, featured the video hits "Inima mea" ("My heart"), "Spune-mi cu ce am gresit" ("Tell me what I did wrong"), and "Iti mai aduci aminte" (Do you remember?). In 2002, Krypton released their second CD album to feature Fodor on vocals, "Stresat de timp" (Streets of time). A video for the song "Cerceii tai" (Your earrings) from that album was released in June 2002 and received extensive airplay via MTV Romania.
She was married to Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017.
Functionalism was formulated by Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor as a reaction to the inadequacies of the identity theory. Putnam and Fodor saw mental states in terms of an empirical computational theory of the mind. At about the same time or slightly after, D.M. Armstrong and David Kellogg Lewis formulated a version of functionalism that analyzed the mental concepts of folk psychology in terms of functional roles. Finally, Wittgenstein's idea of meaning as use led to a version of functionalism as a theory of meaning, further developed by Wilfrid Sellars and Gilbert Harman. Another one, psychofunctionalism, is an approach adopted by the naturalistic philosophy of mind associated with Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn.
Fodor is from Shoreline, Washington. His biological father was from the Caribbean while his biological mother was Caucasian. Fodor along with his brother were placed in foster care, raised by a single mother, and did not actually know that they were related until they were 10 years old. In total, Fodor has three biological siblings as well as three adopted siblings, and one of his adopted brothers Ben Fodor aka Phoenix Jones is also a mixed martial artist. Fodor competed in high school wrestling at Shoreline High School, during his senior year to help prepare himself for boot camp, as he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps six days after his graduation. While he was in boot camp, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred and Fodor was sent to Kuwait for the Iraq invasion. Fodor ended his stint in the military in 2007, reaching the ranks of Sergeant.
In 1938, Fodor investigated the Thornton Heath poltergeist case that involved Mrs. Forbes. According to Rosemary Guiley "Fodor asserted that the psychosis was an episodic mental disturbance of schizophrenic character, and that Mrs. Forbes' unconscious mind was responsible for the activities finally determined to be fraudulent. Fodor eventually identified the cause as sexual trauma that had occurred in Mrs. Forbes's childhood, and had been repressed." Because he was skeptical of the case, Fodor was heavily criticized by spiritualists and was dismissed from his post at the International Institute for Psychical Research. The spiritualist Arthur Findlay, the founder of institute did not approve of his research and resigned. Fodor was attacked in the Spiritualist newspaper, "Psychic News" which he sued for libel. 