Jerry Fodor: Biography and Work of This American Philosopher

Jerry Fodor was an American philosopher, as well as a psycholinguist, scientist and university professor, becoming a professor of philosophy. He was born on April 22, 1935 in New York, and died on November 29, 2017, also in New York, at the age of 82.

Fodor, in addition to being a philosopher and psycholinguist, was a great student of the human mind He proposed an important theory in psychology: the theory of modularity of the mind, which postulates that the mind is divided into compartments with specific functions, and which we will see later.

In addition, Jerry Fodor was one of the founders of functionalism, an important current in psychology, along with other authors such as: William James, James R. Angell, and John Dewey.

Trajectory

Jerry Fodor studied philosophy, and began developing his work in the 1960s. Some of his collaborators consider Fodor to be the creator of the “philosophy of psychology,” and his contributions and knowledge, as we will see later, were especially straddles between these two disciplines.

In the early sixties, Fodor began working as a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the team of Noam Chomsky, an important American linguist. He worked at MIT until 1986.

Thanks to his work, dedication and career, Jerry Fodor He became a professor of philosophy in New Jersey, at Rutger University

Functionalism

One thing to highlight about Jerry Fodor was his relationship with functionalism; Fodor is considered one of the fathers of functionalism in psychology. This philosophical current postulates that mental life and behavior have the fundamental purpose of allowing us to adapt to the environment. Furthermore, it considers that mental processes are mediating functions between sensory inputs and motor outputs.

On the other hand, functionalism allowed the development of other psychological theories and currents.

Work and contributions

Jerry Fodor’s work is extensive and translates into a large number of works; Among them, he has more than a dozen books many of them with a clearly informative tone. He also wrote some thirty publications for the “London Review of Books”, a well-known British literary and political magazine.

Fodor’s works focused on various areas, fields and disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, semiotics, logic, artificial intelligence and computer science, among others.

cognitive science

One of the most important facts that we should know about this philosopher of mind is that his contributions helped create cognitive science, a relatively modern discipline that is responsible for the scientific study of the mind and its processes.

Specifically, Fodor made outstanding contributions in the field of philosophy and psychology; He focused especially on theories that postulate a modularity of the mind. These theories, which we will see later, propose that the mind is divided into certain functions, and that each of them is highly specialized; Furthermore, all of them, although independent, are related to each other.

On the other hand, Jerry Fodor also delved into the philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy that studies language itself through its nature, meaning, and relationship with thought.

Modularity of mind theory

To elaborate his work, Jerry Fodor followed a theoretical orientation focused on the information processing (IP) paradigm Through his vision, and as we have already mentioned, he produced one of his most important works: “The Modularity of Mind”, dated 1983.

In this work we can see the influence that Franz Joseph Gall, the German physiologist who founded phrenology (a pseudoscience that establishes a relationship between the shape of the skull and facial features and personality traits), had on him.

Features of the theory

The theory of modularity of the mind proposes a division of it into two types of systems: input systems (the so-called input analyzers, which are modular) and central systems.

Input systems transfer information to central systems so they can process it According to Jerry Fodor’s theory, only input systems can be empirically tested (because they are modular), as opposed to core systems (which are not).

But how does the human mind work according to Fodor? In his theory of the modularity of the mind, he believes that the mind is divided into various innate and compartmentalized subsystems. Each subsystem develops a specific function: for example we can talk about language, mathematical ability, musical ability, etc.

Fodor adds in his theory that these mental functions and faculties work in a similar way to how computers do, through abstract algorithms.

Sciences and technology

Another interesting fact about this philosopher is his relationship with science and the use of technology Thus, Jerry Fodor was guided a lot by technology and computing to talk about the human mind and the brain. Fodor believed that the brain could be studied very well thanks to technology, but always to a certain point, at which the mind became abstract and imprecise.

Thus, Fodor, through his contributions, attempted to answer the oldest questions of human cognition and the functioning of the mind, through the technology and computing of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Recognition and death

Jerry Fodor obtained a series of recognitions throughout his academic and professional career Some of them were: the Guggenheim Fellowship (in 1972), and a little later the Jean Nicod Prize (in 1993).

Fodor died in 2017 at the age of 82 in his hometown, New York, as a result of Parkinson’s disease and a stroke. His legacy, however, remains valid and it is likely that he will remain so for many decades. The mark that he has left in the field of psychology and philosophy is undeniable.