# Quote — Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind

> 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.

- Author: [Jerry A. Fodor](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor.md)
- Book: [The Modularity of Mind](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind.md)
- Page: 1
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor#Modularity_of_Mind_(1983)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jerry-a-fodor/the-modularity-of-mind/this-monograph-is-about

## More from this book

> 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)