Background
Fodor, Jerry Alan was born in 1935 in New York, United States.
Fodor, Jerry Alan was born in 1935 in New York, United States.
Fodor is best known for his trenchant defence of realism about the mental and for his equally strong adherence to a form of innatism about concepts which owes much to the influence of Chomsky. According to Fodor, cognitive states are to be construed as relations between the agent and representations physically instantiated in the brain; congnitive processes are then computational operations on these internal items. Thus the ordinary concepts of belief, hoping, etc. are real, even though this characterization does not answer to an informal understanding of these notions. Fodor is not. therefore, giving an ‘ordinary language’ analysis of these, but making a claim about the nature of the things to which they apply. Fodor supplements this Representational Theory of The Mind, with his 'Language of Thought’ hypothesis—that the medium of these repesentations is linguistic and can be described as having a syntax. The crux of the problem is whether there can be anything more than syntax, if context and environment are excluded. Both Fodor and his opponents acknowledge that there is an intra-cranial contribution to the business of meaning, but there remains a problem of how the internal and external elements come together. Fodor’s argument for a ‘narrow’ story over a 'wide' story is that only the former is adequate to capture the role of the propositional attitudes in relation to behaviour. What matters is not how things are in the world outside the head, but how the world seems to the agent. Fodor embraces the strategy ot ‘Methodological Solipsism’, the aim of which is to assign meanings to ‘inner representations' in a way which does not presuppose the existence of anything beyond the individual and his thoughts. Fodor does not deny a place for a ‘wide’ account taking in truth and reference, but disputes that this can play any part in accounting for behaviour. Nor does he intend his account as defending any idiosyncratic or subjective ‘meanings’: narrow content of representations is what any two individuals share if their representations play essentially the same cognitive roles in their respective heads. They would be in the same states, narrowly speaking. Critics have posed the tough question of whether the content of narrow states would really deserve to be called 'semantic’ at all. Fodor has battled with many of the most prominent contemporary analytic philosophers, attacking holism in Quine and Davidson, instrumentalism about the mental in the work of Dennett, and linguistic platonism in Jerrold Katz, all the while writing in an engagingly facetious style, with frequent reference to his aunt and grandmother.