Jerry Fodor
Analytic · North America · 1935 to 2017
American philosopher who held that the mind works like a computer, with its own inner language of thought.
What it is
Jerry Fodor (1935 to 2017) was an American philosopher of mind. Born in New York City, he studied at Columbia and Princeton, taught at MIT until 1986, and later at the City University of New York and Rutgers, where he stayed until he retired in 2016.
He is best known for arguing that thinking consists of computations carried out on inner representations, so that the mind has something like a language of its own. In the 1960s he was among those who criticised the behaviourism that then dominated much philosophy and psychology.
The main ideas
- Physical, yet not reducible. He accepted that everything in the world is physical or depends on the physical. He also opposed reductive accounts of the mind: on his view mental states are realized by, but not reducible to, physical states of the brain.
- Functionalism. A belief or a desire is defined by what it does, by the causes and effects it has, and not by the stuff it is made of.
- A language of thought. Beliefs and desires are relations to mental representations. Thinking is the working of those representations according to their structure, in a kind of inner language.
- Modules. Parts of the mind, such as perception and the processing of language, are specialised systems, fairly independent of each other and of central reasoning.
- Innate concepts. He argued that basic concepts, those for which a language has a single word, cannot be built from simpler ones, and so must be innate.
What it looks like in practice
Picture someone who reads that two lines in a drawing are the same length but still sees one as longer. A Fodor-style reading is that the part of the mind that sees does not take in what the person knows. This is an illustration of the idea, not a passage from his writing.
Books and moments
- The Language of Thought (1975) sets out the view that beliefs and desires are relations to inner representations.
- Psychological Explanation (1968) is an early defence of an alternative to behaviourism.
Questions and criticism
- How can a physical thing mean something? A theory of inner symbols has to explain how they can be about things in the world, and it is an open question whether his answers succeed.
- Innate concepts. It is a fair question whether so many concepts can really be inborn.
- Where is the limit of the module? It is open how much of the mind is modular and how much is the general reasoning that he set apart.
Close neighbours
The pages on Daniel Dennett and John Searle give other answers to what the mind is, and the page on Hilary Putnam belongs to the same discussion.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Influenced by
- Hilary Putnam · He took up Putnam's view that mental states are like programs that many bodies could run.
Other Analytic thinkers
- Gottlob Frege · 1848 to 1925
- Bertrand Russell · 1872 to 1970
- G. E. Moore · 1873 to 1958
- Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1889 to 1951
- Gilbert Ryle · 1900 to 1976
- Karl Popper · 1902 to 1994
- H. L. A. Hart · 1907 to 1992
- W. V. O. Quine · 1908 to 2000
- J. L. Austin · 1911 to 1960
- Wilfrid Sellars · 1912 to 1989
Sources we used
- Jerry Fodor · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- Jerry Fodor · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026