Asks Quote by 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.”

Jerry Fodor

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Asks Credentials Doubt Ifs Imagine Life Phds Philosophy Wanted

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Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean,…

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...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is…

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...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…

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To the best of my recollection, I became a philosopher because my parents wanted me to become a lawyer. It seems to me, in…

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Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive.

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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…

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On my bad days, I sometimes wonder what philosophers are for.

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“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…

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Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation - e.g., the…

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The theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: if a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must…

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The degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties…

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The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.

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Explore all 22 Jerry Fodor quotes

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There is nothing more I ask of this life than this moment, exactly so. And suddenly forever seems like too short a time.

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