Jerry Fodor (1935–2017)
American philosopher and cognitive scientist; professor at MIT, then CUNY Graduate Center, and Rutgers for most of his career. One of the founders of the philosophy of cognitive science and the most important defender of the autonomy of the special sciences. 1
Special Sciences and Multiple Realization
His classic 1974 paper “Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)” (Synthese 28: 97–115) argues that higher-level scientific kinds (economics, psychology, linguistics) need not map one-to-one onto physical kinds — undermining the classical “unity of science” reductionist program. 1
The argument turns on multiple realizability (building on Hilary Putnam):
- A mental category like pain can be instantiated by very different physical systems (human neurons, octopus brains, hypothetical silicon)
- So
M₁ → P₁,M₁ → P₂,M₁ → P₃… — the same higher-level property has many physically distinct realizers - Therefore there may be no unique neural state X such that pain = X, and simple type-identity reduction fails
- Special-science laws can be genuine, projectible, and exceptionless at their own level while their physical realizations form a wild, disjunctive, heterogeneous set
Key consequence for emergence:
A higher-level property can be completely physically realized without being identical to any one particular lower-level property. Materialism does not require identity of scientific descriptions across levels.
Other Contributions
- The Language of Thought (1975) — mentalese; systematicity and productivity of thought require a combinatorial internal representational system
- Modularity of Mind (1983) — input systems are domain-specific, fast, mandatory, informationally encapsulated
- The Modularity of Mind and his intentional-realism period: assemblages of nomic generalizations (“laws”) at the intentional level are real science, not folk taxonomy
Relationship to This Wiki
- Multiple realization is one of the two pillar arguments (with interventionist causation) for higher-level autonomy on emergence
- His token-physicalism — token mental events identical to token physical events, but no type reduction — is exactly the “dependence without type identity” distinction the article’s central thesis requires
- His critique of reductionism parallels the special-science autonomy defended in what-is-intelligence-book (Agüera y Arcas’s levels-of-explanation functionalism) and is the historical backdrop for the chinese-room-argument debate about what psychology should quantify over
See Also
- emergence — Multiple realization as a route to higher-level autonomy
- jaegwon-kim — His principal critic (Kim argued multiple realization does not save mental causation)
- what-is-intelligence-book — Contemporary functionalism extending his program
References
- Fodor, J. A. (1974). “Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis).” Synthese 28: 97–115.
- Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.
- Aizawa, K. & Gillett, C. — “Multiple Realizability”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1
- Wikipedia: Jerry Fodor