Born in New York city and educated at Columbia and Princeton, Fodor taught at Rutgers and the City University of New York. He was known for a resolute realism about the nature of mental functioning. Taking the analogy between thought and computation seriously, Fodor believed that mental representations should be conceived as individual states with their own identities and structures, like formulae transformed by processes of computation or thought. His views are frequently contrasted with those of holists such as Davidson, or instrumentalists about mental ascription, such as Dennett. In his later years he became a vocal critic of some of the aspirations of cognitive science. Works include The Language of Thought (1975), The Modularity of Mind (1983), Psychosemantics (1987), The Elm and the Expert (1994), Concepts: Where Cognitive Science went wrong (1998), and Hume Variations (2003).