Jerry Fodor

How I got into this. John Sturrock called from the LRB. He knows that I like opera a lot, and that I now and then get tired of writing papers about the mind/body problem for philosophy journals. ‘Would I like to report on the new pop version of Aida? (Elton John, Tim Rice and, rumour has it, a transparent swimming-pool.)’ I pretend to have heard of Elton John and Tim Rice. Sturrock sounds amused, possibly at my expense. ‘Sure, what have I got to lose?’ I say.‘

Why, why, does everyone go on so about the brain? Each Tuesday, the New York Times does its section on science, to which I am addicted. I like best the astrophysical stuff on pulsars and quasars and black holes and how old and far away everything is; there’s a pleasantly vertiginous aftertaste that sometimes lasts until ‘Arts and Entertainment’ comes out on Saturday. But I’m quite prepared to settle for the breaking news on whether birds are dinosaurs, or when Africa was last attached to Brazil, or which kind of cholesterol is good for you after all. It’s all grist for the same mill: how odd it is how odd the world turns out to be.‘

Maybe, some day, we’ll have serious and well-confirmed theories about how minds work; theories that actually explain interesting things. Historians of science will then be able to consider psychology as just another episode in the long struggle. If so, I bet they’re struck by how often in 20th-century behavioural science methodological nuttiness got in the way. Why, they’ll wonder, did psychology feel compelled to embark on its investigations by tying one hand behind its back and using the other to shoot itself in the foot? Didn’t problems about the mind seem hard enough to bear without adding a freight of procedural inhibitions?