Jerry Fodor

Fodor proposed that thinking occurs in an internal symbolic system he called 'Mentalese,' in which mental representations have both syntactic and semantic properties analogous to sentences in a natural language. He argued that cognitive processes operate by manipulating these internal symbols according to formal rules, making the mind fundamentally computational in nature.

In his 1983 book The Modularity of Mind, Fodor argued that certain cognitive capacities—particularly perception and language processing—operate as specialized, domain-specific modules that are informationally encapsulated, meaning they function independently of a person's beliefs and expectations. He contrasted these input systems with central cognitive processes like reasoning and belief fixation, which he believed resist systematic scientific study.

Yes, Fodor was a prominent and persistent critic of connectionist models of cognition, arguing that neural networks could not adequately explain the systematicity and productivity of human thought. He defended classical computational architecture, in which mental operations involve rule-governed manipulation of structured, language-like representations, against what he saw as the eliminativist implications of connectionism.

Fodor held positions at MIT, the City University of New York (CUNY), and Rutgers University, where he spent much of his later career from the late 1980s until his death in 2017. He was one of the founders of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field and his work on the computational theory of mind influenced philosophers, linguists, and psychologists across several decades.