“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?” — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
...if it isn't literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in retrospect, that there was much to be said for their suggestion. On the other hand, many philosophers are quite good company; the arguments they use are generally better than the ones that lawyers use; and we… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive. — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
“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… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know. — Jerry Fodor Copy Share Image
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