Is Jerry Fodor worth reading, if you're into phil. of mind?

Is Jerry Fodor worth reading, if you're into phil. of mind?

Or is he as much of a dumbfuck as everyone makes him out to be?

no

He's worth reading if you care about the philosophy of psychology. He seems well respected in the field, the only people who would say otherwise are illiterates on this board who wont pick up a book

Dan Dennett doesnt take him seriously lol

He's historically relevant. That being said, his work becomes less and less relevant the more up to date your cog.sci. knowledge is. The Language of Thought and The Modularity if Mind are both pretty fun, but they are very much a product of their time. That being said, they are not difficult reads if you have some background in analytic philosophy, and you are expected to be familiar with the ideas if you want to talk about cognitive architecture.

>FODOR! FODOR! Fo oo dor... Fold the door!

I’d bet there are more in philosophy who don’t take Dan Dennett seriously

>
Yeah. Fodor is definitely taken more seriously in the analytic mainstream than Dennett. Dennett was important for the philosophy of consciousness as a sub-subdiscipline, but Fodor's theses and arguments have had a larger impact in the mainstream of the profession. And for all Dennett's love for naturalism, Fodor is the one who actually makes attempts to grapple with more current arguments and theses of people doing science in the immediate vicinity of his own interests.

Dan Dennett or David Chalmers

Who is taken more seriously?

and even then he's only worth reading if you care about the history of philosophy of mind, since fodor's claims about the nature of mind are pretty much certainyl wrong at this point

top kek m8

>fodor's claims about the nature of mind are pretty much certainyl wrong at this point
backstory on this?

>he claims that the mind thinks according to the rules of some "language of thought".
>only makes claims about the mind, as according to him understanding the brain is not too relevant re: understanding how humans think

Chalmers I’d say. I’m pretty sure the property dualism idea is still pretty big. And the ‘extended mind’ thesis is contentious but definitely got people talking.

Yes the language of thought hypothesis is stupid

Now that computational theory of mind, that's some good science shit right there

>I’m pretty sure the property dualism idea is still pretty big
I thought property dualism was waxing instead of waning, unless something has changed in the past 10 years or so

i don't know man, most philosophy of mind strikes me as weaponized autism pretty much. it seems to be more or less irrelevant to actual neuroscience and AI research as well.

Why is it stupid? What makes something "good science shit" and why is that the barometer by which we judge the strength of an explicitly philosophical theory that is not at odds with current research?

Well, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of AI do not tackle the same questions as neuroscience and AI research. Why would you expect them to?

I study the philosophy/history of epistemology and philosophical psychology, and when I first ran into the cogsci people, originally through Fodor, it was staggering. It was like someone had taken all the stuff that I studied, taken a 101 class in it, attended three of the 20 classes, and then garbled some of it together. Reading Fodor was like being thirsty and tipping a bottle expecting a mouthful of water, and only a few drops came out.

Holy shit it was bad. I think I ran into him alongside that pair of guys, Fauconnier and Turner? That were also embarrassingly bad, thinned-out, pathetic grab bag versions of shit they cribbed from real thinkers. I had just read Ricoeur's _Rule of Metaphor_ and I was looking for more concrete applications, and what I got was something that managed to take the most amazing cutting edge of philosophy that currently exists, the most important frontier of human thought that is only just beginning to be breached where there is infinite fertile ground for revolutionary discovery, and somehow manages to reduce it to a paltry cognitive science research program and miss almost all its grandeur.

The only thing more infuriating than reading these retards was reading that Hofstadter book on metaphor. Not only bad, but deliberately ignorant of existing scholarship to the point that it had less content in 500 pages than a 5-page essay I could have written off the top of my head in the first 6 months of studying this topic.

he's less of a dumbfuck than john searle at least

except he's right about everything