Jerry Fodor

An American philosopher whose work laid much of the intellectual groundwork for cognitive science, arguing in the 1980s that the mind is organized into specialized, semi-independent "modules" for tasks like vision and language rather than operating as one undifferentiated system. His language-of-thought hypothesis proposed that thinking itself has a syntactic structure resembling a formal language. He spent much of his career at Rutgers after teaching at MIT and CUNY, and his writing shaped philosophy of mind for two generations of researchers.