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
  • Sandy Yang - vocals

Interpretations

The song is based on a joke recounted in philosopher Jerry Fodor's 1998 essay The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism

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?

The story is also discussed in Art & Language: Interview with Victorine Meurend

A&L: Artistic ostension, pointing to bits of the world in its outward manifestations like installation and its intendant burblings in the manner of context and so forth, has turned us all, to a greater and lesser extent, into Jerry Fodor's ugly lawyer.

Meurend: What does he do?

A&L: [laughs] He meets a girl a couple of times and on their third meeting, she says, "I want to go back to my place and have wild, uninhibited sex." He says, "That might be OK for you, but what's in it for me?"

Meurend: You mean that the world is crudely instrumentalized, that it's only there for the purposes of professionalized imperialism?

A&L: We are left to grieve for the loss of innocent pleasure. Perhaps that's OK. We aren't very professional and you're not even Victorine Meurend. We are not even artists, but actors playing artists in a theory installation by the Jackson Pollock Bar.

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.