“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,… — 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
...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
To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive. — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
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… — 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
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
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
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
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
Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads. — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
There are lots of cases where we know more about how the world works than we do about how we know how it works.… — Jerry Fodor Copy Share
