Quotes from Jerry Fodor

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.

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.

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect. ...[but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs.

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

If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68)

One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)

One man's affirmation of the consecuent is another's man inference to the best explanation (Psychosemantics, pp. 149)

Empiricism isn't true, and it is time to put away childish things.

Why isn't every basic law a miracle by definition?

For Helen Keller, it was not visual perception that sustained the meaning-making dog-DOG relation. Yet she and I, each in our way, can both satisfy the conditions for DOG-possession according to the present [rationalist] account of those conditions.

Thought about the world is prior to thought about how to change the world. Accordingly, knowing-that is prior to knowing-how. Descartes was right and Ryle was wrong. Why, after all these years, does one still have to say these things?

Look, suppose you're an official in the National Science Foundation, and a guy comes to you and says: Listen I have this interesting idea, give me $100,000 and I'll work on it. And then 50 of the most respected people in the field come up to you and say: Look, the guy's crazy, that can't be true. Who are you going to believe? You're going to end up supporting a very conservative, middle brow scientific institution. It's hopeless.

Light bulbs are very, VERY complicated.

You could perfectly well have a machine whose function is to produce things that are themselves functionless. In a consumer society you might have quite a lot of these.

Pinker quotes Chomsky's remark that 'ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries' and continues: 'I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)' Well, cheerfulness sells books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: 'the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.