Abstract

Jerry Fodor was one of the most important philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In addition to exerting an enormous influence on virtually all parts of the literature in the philosophy of mind since 1960, Fodor’s work had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences. In the 1960s, along with Hilary Putnam, Noam Chomsky, and others, Fodor presented influential criticisms of the behaviorism that dominated much philosophy and psychology at the time. Fodor went on to articulate and defend an alternative conception of intentional states and their content that he argues vindicates the core elements of folk psychology within a physicalist framework.