Jerry Fodor's Story

Lyrics

At the end of a day, That's been made to pay, Still pressed and clean, The partner who's been The best legal brain - Told again and again; He needs R and R, So he gets in his car And drives to a place Where everyone's ace. When nothing remains Of his glass of champagne, A woman so pretty She'd stop dead a city Comes in with such grace And looks in his face. The woman sits down. "Why are you guys so serious? It seems deleterious. Do you want to come home With me quite alone? Then we could get laid. You won't be betrayed. I'm looking for pleasure - For stretching the measure". "But what's in it for me?" Said the ugly V.P.

Chronology

• Sighs Trapped by Liars

Interpretations

• From Jerry Fodor's essay 'The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism', 1998
  • At one point Pinker quotes H.L. Mencken's wisecrack that 'the most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.' Quite so. I suppose it could turn out that one's interest in having friends, or in reading fictions, or in Wagner's operas, is really at heart prudential. But the claim affronts a robust, and I should think salubrious, intuition that there are lots and lots of things that we care about simply for themselves. Reductionism about this plurality of goals, when not Philistine or cheaply cynical, often sounds simply funny. Thus the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex by a beautiful girl. 'Well, I guess so,' he replies, 'but what's in it for me?' Does wanting to have a beautiful woman - or, for that matter, a good read - really require a further motive to explain it?
• Mayo Thompson on Jerry Fodor, 2010
  • I read a little bit of history from time to time, but mostly philosophy. Cognitive philosophy. My favorite is Jerry Fodor, but there are a lot of them that I also read. And I don’t read only people that I agree with. You want to know what people are thinking, I want to know what the arguments are, so I read a range of different things. But Fodor is for me the most profoundly critical of all the voices, and he trades in mental representation, which I find a really fascinating problem. ‘Cause it’s even hard to talk about it, and how the relations work out, and his arguments I find always compelling.