Clergyman's

If 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.
- Jerry Fodor

If 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.
- Jerry Fodor

If 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.
- Jerry Fodor

If 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.
- Jerry Fodor

Philosophers who have wanted to banish the ghost from the machine have usually sought to do so by showing that truths about behavior can sometimes, and in some sense, logically implicate truths about mental states. In so doing, they have rather strongly suggested that the exorcism can be carried through only if such a logical connection can be made out. … nce it has been made clear that the choice between dualism and behaviorism is not exhaustive, a major motivation for the defense of behaviorism is removed: we are not required to be behaviorists simply in order to avoid being dualists.
- Jerry Fodor

I hate relativism. I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats... surely, surely, no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.
- Jerry Fodor

If people differ in an absolutely general way in their estimations of epistemic relevance, and if we follow the holism of meaning and individuate intentional states by way of the totality of their epistemic bonds, the consequence will be that two people will never be in the same intentional state. Therefore, two people can never be subsumed under the same intentional generalizations. And, therefore, intentional generalization can never be successful. And, therefore again, there is no hope for an intentional psychology.
- Jerry Fodor

he degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system … simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems.
- Jerry Fodor

FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By 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 by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.
- Jerry Fodor

From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of ""horse"" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of ""horse"" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if ""horse"" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called ""horse."" Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying ""this is a horse"" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say ""horse"" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say ""horse""; but the fact that horses cause one to say ""horse"" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say ""horse""...
- Jerry Fodor