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Jerry Fodor

The Language of Thought

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Consciousness

Abstract

Jerry Alan Fodor (born in 1935 in New York City) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His theories on the nature of language and mental states have heavily influenced both the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In 1956, Fodor gained his A.B. degree from Columbia University and in 1960 his PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, under the supervision of Hilary Putnam (see Chap. 13). From 1959, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he taught in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology until 1986. He subsequently became Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and in 1988 was appointed State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University.

I assume that psychological laws are typically implemented

by computational processes.

(The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its Semantics)

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References

  • Baddeley A (2007) Working memory, thought, and action. Oxford University Press, Oxford

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  • Fodor J (1983) The modularity of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

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  • Fodor J (1994) The elm and the expert: mentalese and its semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

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  • Fodor J (2008) LOT 2: the language of thought revisited. Oxford University Press, Oxford

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Cavanna, A.E., Nani, A. (2014). Jerry Fodor. In: Consciousness. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44088-9_7

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