Jerry Alan Fodor (born in 1935) is a Philosophe étasunien. It is one of the principal representatives of the functionalism in Philosophie of the spirit.

He is the author of important works in the cognitive Sciences on the assumption of Modularité of the spirit and on the Langage of the thought. He is also known for his arguments in epistemology against the Réductionnisme.

Biography

Jerry Fodor received its diploma of the Université of Columbia in 1956 and supported its Doctorate in philosophy with the Université of Princeton in 1960 under the direction of Hilary Putnam. From 1959 to 1986, Fodor was member of the MIT. From 1986 to 1988, he was Professor with City University off New York (CUNY). Since 1988 he is professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences with Rutgers University in the New Jersey.

Jerry Fodor received the first Prix Jean Nicod in 1993.

Philosophy

Fodor defends since the Sixties a functionalist program in philosophy of cognitive sciences. The mental states are real (against the Behaviorisme or the eliminativism) and they are defined by their functional role.

In The Language off Thought (1975), it exposes the assumption according to which the mental representations must be analyzed like a mental language (from where the term sometimes used of mentalese , " mentalais").

The structure of this language of the thought, just like the Syntaxe of the universal Grammaire according to Noam Chomsky would be in fact innate.

The spirit would thus have an architecture with specialized modules and the sensory module would be isolated from the concepts.