# Jerry A. Fodor

- Quotes: 6
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor

## Books

- [The Modularity of Mind](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind.md) — 6 quotes

## Recently added quotes

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

p. 69 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/the-data-that.md)

> 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.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/faculty-psychology-is-getting.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/i-hate-relativism.md)

> [T]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.

p. 107 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/t-he-degree-of-confirmation.md)

> Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation- e.g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of non-demonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hypotheses on the basis of a certain body of data.

p. 126 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/suppose-that-the.md)

> This monograph is about the current status of the program; not so much its evidential status (which I take to be, for the most part, an open question ) as what the program is and where it does, and doesn't, seem natural to try to apply it. Specifically I want to do the following things: (1) distinguish the general claim that there are psychological faculties from a particular version of that claim, which I shall call the modularity thesis; (2) enumerate some of the properties that modular cognitive systems are likely to exhibit in virtue of their modularity ; and (3) consider whether it is possible to formulate any plausible hypothesis about which mental processes are likely to be the modular ones. Toward the end of the discussion, I'll also try to do something by way of (4) disentangling the faculty jmodularity issues from what I'll call the thesis of Epistemic Boundedness: the idea that there are endogenously determined constraints on the kinds of problems that human beings can solve, hence on the kinds of things that we can know.

p. 1 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/this-monograph-is-about.md)