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“... of the mind, and certain parts of it are known to specialise in particular mental functions. As Jerry Fodor, the author of this splendidly provocative book, puts it, ‘the good that men do is oft interred with their doctoral dissertations.’ His aim is to disinter the idea that there are separate mental faculties and to develop it unencumbered by ...”

“... is sometimes exaggerated, this is the effect Chomsky had on the behaviourist study of humans. Jerry Fodor now hopes to do something similar to Darwinism in biology. Fodor has been making sceptical remarks about Darwinian ideas for decades. Three years ago he wrote a direct attack on Darwinian evolutionary theory in ...”

“... in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad ...”

“... be, in the sense just described, mechanically possible. This is the view favoured by, for example, Jerry Fodor. The story goes like this. Formal logic shows us that we can preserve truth simply by attending to form, not meaning. If we keep to certain rules we will never infer a falsehood from true premises, even if we have no idea what either the premises ...”

“... an inherited module for syntax. Then came perceptual modules (David Marr), modules for reasoning (Jerry Fodor) and finally modules for every mental ability great and small (Dan Sperber). Modularity gone mad, says Fodor. Atran is content with a modest menu of modules. In his own speciality, he has modules for ...”

“... is a version of ‘inferential role’ or ‘conceptual role’ semantics. In their book Holism, Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore state that ‘quite a lot of the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind since the 1940s’ has operated with some version of this semantics. In contrast, Brandom’s blurb states that his semantics is a ‘near-Copernican ...”