Faculty Psychology is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology 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 FodorIt simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for fitness than being polygamous... except when there are effects of interacting variables... It's not that the underlying generalizations are there but imperceptible in the ambient noise.
Jerry FodorI rather doubt that life has a meaning. If I thought perhaps it did, and I wanted to find out what its meaning is, I don't imagine I'd ask someone whose credentials consist of a PhD in philosophy.
Jerry FodorI 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 FodorPhilosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.
Jerry Fodor...there are special sciences not because of the nature of our epistemic relation to the world, but because of the way the world is put together: not all natural kinds (not all the classes of things and events about which there are important, counterfactual supporting generalizations to make) are, or correspond to, physical natural kinds.
Jerry Fodor