Fodor, Jerry

"Understanding consciousness requires understanding intentionality first."

"Mental content supervenes on relational properties, not intrinsic properties alone."

"Rationality is both a feature of minds and a norm for thinking."

"The study of mind is continuous with the study of nature."

"Thought involves tokening representations in the language of thought."

"Understanding other minds is achieved through psychological attribution."

"The mind's intentionality explains its causal powers."

"Mental states are individuated by their content and functional role."

"The reducibility of psychology is both theoretically unmotivated and empirically unlikely."

"Intentional explanation is indispensable to cognitive science."

"The mind is not a blank slate; it comes equipped with innate structures that shape how we perceive reality."

"Intentionality is the mark of the mental - our thoughts are always about something."

"If you want to understand the mind, you must study the brain, but not reduce the mind to mere brain activity."

"Language of thought is the foundation upon which all cognition rests."

"Modularity of mind explains why we can be brilliant in one domain and foolish in another."

"The ghost in the machine was never about dualism; it was about acknowledging what we don't yet understand."

"Cognitive science requires that we take seriously the computational nature of thought."

"Semantic content cannot be reduced to physical properties alone - meaning transcends matter."

"Fodor's Law: The more abstract something is, the less it matters whether it's true or false."

"We are all cognitive misers - we take mental shortcuts because thinking is expensive."

"Representation is central to understanding how minds work, not peripheral to it."

"The problem with most theories of mind is they confuse explanation with description."

"If the mind didn't have innate concepts, learning would be impossible - not the reverse."

"You cannot think about what you don't have representations of."

"Compositionality is not a bug in language; it's the fundamental feature that makes thought possible."

"Cognitive impenetrability explains why optical illusions persist even when we know better."

"The Chinese Room argument misses the point about what understanding really requires."

"Natural selection gave us minds, but it didn't tell us what minds are made of."

"Consciousness is the hard problem because we insist on solving it with the wrong tools."

"Every mental state is about something - that aboutness is what makes psychology possible."