What college did Jerry Alan Fodor attend?

Jerry Fodor was born in New York City on April 22, 1935, and was of Jewish descent. He received his A.B. degree ("summa cum laude") from Columbia University in 1956, where he studied with Sydney Morgenbesser, and a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, under the direction of Hilary Putnam. From 1959 to 1986 Fodor was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1986 to 1988 he was a full professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). From 1988 until his retirement in 2016 he was State of New Jersey Professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he was emeritus. Besides his interest in philosophy, Fodor passionately followed opera and regularly wrote popular columns for the "London Review of Books" on that and other topics.

Jerry Fodor

Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."

Fodor argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool. Fodor adhered to a species of functionalism, maintaining that thinking and other mental processes consist primarily of computations operating on the syntax of the representations that make up the language of thought.

For Fodor, significant parts of the mind, such as perceptual and linguistic processes, are structured in terms of modules, or "organs", which he defines by their causal and functional roles. These modules are relatively independent of each other and of the "central processing" part of the mind, which has a more global and less "domain specific" character. Fodor suggests that the character of these modules permits the possibility of causal relations with external objects. This, in turn, makes it possible for mental states to have contents that are about things in the world. The central processing part, on the other hand, takes care of the logical relations between the various contents and inputs and outputs.

Although Fodor originally rejected the idea that mental states must have a causal, externally determined aspect, in his later years he devoted much of his writing and study to the philosophy of language because of this problem of the meaning and reference of mental contents. His contributions in this area include the so-called asymmetric causal theory of reference and his many arguments against semantic holism. Fodor strongly opposed reductive accounts of the mind. He argued that mental states are multiple realizable and that there is a hierarchy of explanatory levels in science such that the generalizations and laws of a higher-level theory of psychology or linguistics, for example, cannot be captured by the low-level explanations of the behavior of neurons and synapses. He also emerged as a prominent critic of what he characterized as the ill-grounded Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of natural selection.

Philosopher Colin McGinn, who taught with Fodor at Rutgers, described him in these words:

Fodor (who is a close friend) is a gentle man inside a burly body, and prone to an even burlier style of arguing. He is shy and voluble at the same time... a formidable polemicist burdened with a sensitive soul... Disagreeing with Jerry on a philosophical issue, especially one dear to his heart, can be a chastening experience... His quickness of mind, inventiveness, and sharp wit are not to be tangled with before your first cup of coffee in the morning. Adding Jerry Fodor to the faculty at Rutgers [University] instantly put it on the map, Fodor being by common consent "the leading philosopher of mind" in the world today. I had met him in England in the seventies and... found him to be the genuine article, intellectually speaking (though we do not always see eye to eye).
Fodor was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received numerous awards and honors: New York State Regent's Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (Princeton University), Chancellor Greene Fellow (Princeton University), Fulbright Fellowship (University of Oxford), Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the first Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind and cognitive philosophy in 1993. His lecture series for the Prize, later published as a book by MIT Press in 1995, was titled "The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its Semantics". In 1996–1997, Fodor delivered the prestigious John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, titled "Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong", which went on to become his 1998 Oxford University Press book of the same name. He has also delivered the Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism (2004) and the Royce Lecture on Philosophy of Mind (2002) to the American Philosophical Association, of whose Eastern Division he has served as Vice President (2004–2005) and President (2005–2006). In 2005, he won the Mind & Brain Prize.

He lived in New York with his wife, the linguist Janet Dean Fodor, and had two children. Fodor died on November 29, 2017, at his home in Manhattan.

In his article "Propositional Attitudes" (1978), Fodor introduced the idea that mental states are relations between individuals and mental representations. Despite the changes in many of his positions over the years, the idea that intentional attitudes are relational has remained unchanged from its original formulation up to.

In that article, he attempted to show how mental representations, specifically sentences in the language of thought, are necessary to explain this relational nature of mental states. Fodor considers two alternative hypotheses. The first completely denies the relational character of mental states and the second considers mental states as two-place relations. The latter position can be further subdivided into the Carnapian view that such relations are between individuals and sentences of natural languages and the Fregean view that they are between individuals and the propositions expressed by such sentences.
Fodor's own position, instead, is that to properly account for the nature of intentional attitudes, it is necessary to employ a "three-place" relation between individuals, representations and propositional contents.

Considering mental states as three-place relations in this way, representative realism makes it possible to hold together all of the elements necessary to the solution of this problem. Further, mental representations are not only the objects of beliefs and desires, but are also the domain over which mental processes operate. They can be considered the ideal link between the syntactic notion of mental content and the computational notion of functional architecture. These notions are, according to Fodor, our best explanation of mental processes.

Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this position emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Historically, questions about mental architecture have been divided into two contrasting theories about the nature of the faculties. The first can be described as a "horizontal" view because it sees mental processes as interactions between faculties which are not domain specific. For example, a judgment remains a judgment whether it is judgment about a perceptual experience or a judgment about the understanding of language. The second can be described as a "vertical" view because it claims that our mental faculties are domain specific, genetically determined, associated with distinct neurological structures, and so on.

The vertical vision can be traced back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed that mental faculties could be associated with specific physical areas of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be literally "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproved over the course of the last century.

Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became one of the most vocal proponents of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph "Modularity of Mind". Two properties of modularity in particular, "informational encapsulation" and "domain specificity", make it possible to tie together questions of functional architecture with those of mental content. The ability to elaborate information independently from the background beliefs of individuals that these two properties allow Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of the notion of mental content. The main idea, in other words, is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, rather than exclusively on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, also on their causal relations with the external world.

Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, among many others. But Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" have taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.

In "A Theory of Content and Other Essays" (1990), Fodor takes up another of his central notions: the question of the reality of mental representations. Fodor needs to justify representational realism to justify the idea that the contents of mental states are expressed in symbolic structures such as those of the LOT.

Fodor starts with some criticisms of so-called "standard realism". This view is characterized, according to Fodor, by two distinct assertions. One of these regards the internal structure of mental states and asserts that such states are non-relational. The other concerns the semantic theory of mental content and asserts that there is an isomorphism between the causal roles of such contents and the inferential web of beliefs. Among modern philosophers of mind, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true. Fodor departs from this view in accepting the truth of the first thesis but rejecting strongly the truth of the second.

In particular, Fodor criticizes the instrumentalism of Daniel Dennett. Dennett maintains that it is possible to be realist with regard to intentional states without having to commit oneself to the reality of mental representations. Now, according to Fodor, if one remains at this level of analysis, then there is no possibility of explaining "why" the intentional strategy works:There is... a standard objection to instrumentalism...: it is difficult to explain why the psychology of beliefs/desires works so well, if the psychology of beliefs/desires is, in fact, false... As Putnam, Boyd and others have emphasized, from the predictive successes of a theory to the truth of that theory there is surely a presumed inference; and this is even more likely when... we are dealing with the "only" theory in play which is predictively crowned with success. It is not obvious... why such a presumption should not militate in favour of a realist conception... of the interpretations of beliefs/desires.

Fodor also has "positive" arguments in favour of the reality of mental representations in terms of the LOT. He maintains that if language is the expression of thoughts and language is systematic, then thoughts must also be systematic. Fodor draws on the work of Noam Chomsky to both model his theory of the mind and to refute alternative architectures such as connectionism. Systematicity in natural languages was explained by Chomsky in terms of two more basic concepts: productivity and compositionality.

Productivity refers to a representational system's unbounded ability to generate new representations from a given set of symbols. "John", "loves", and "Mary" allow for the construction of the sentences "John loves Mary" and "Mary loves John". Fodor's language of thought theorizes that representations are decomposable into constituent parts, and these decomposed representations are built into new strings.

More important than productivity is systematicity since it does not rely on questionable idealizations about human cognition. The argument states that a cognizer is able to understand some sentence in virtue of understanding another. For example, no one who understands "John loves Mary" is unable to understand "Mary loves John", and no one who understands "P and Q" is unable to understand "P". Systematicity itself is rarely challenged as a property of natural languages and logics, but some challenge that thought is systematic in the same way languages are. Still others from the connectionist tradition have tried to build non-classical networks that can account for the apparent systematicity of language.

The fact that systematicity and productivity depend on the compositional structure of language means that language has a combinatorial semantics. If thought also has such a combinatorial semantics, then there must be a language of thought.

The second argument that Fodor provides in favour of representational realism involves the processes of thought. This argument touches on the relation between the representational theory of mind and models of its architecture. If the sentences of Mentalese require unique processes of elaboration then they require a computational mechanism of a certain type. The syntactic notion of mental representations goes hand in hand with the idea that mental processes are calculations which act only on the "form" of the symbols which they elaborate. And this is the computational theory of the mind. Consequently, the defence of a model of architecture based on classic artificial intelligence passes inevitably through a defence of the reality of mental representations.

For Fodor, this formal notion of thought processes also has the advantage of highlighting the parallels between the causal role of symbols and the contents which they express. In his view, syntax plays the role of mediation between the causal role of the symbols and their contents. The semantic relations between symbols can be "imitated" by their syntactic relations. The inferential relations which connect the "contents" of two symbols can be imitated by the formal syntax rules which regulate the derivation of one symbol from another.

From the beginning of the 1980s, Fodor adhered to a causal notion of mental content and of meaning. This idea of content contrasts sharply with the inferential role semantics to which he subscribed earlier in his career. Fodor criticizes inferential role semantics (IRS) because its commitment to an extreme form of holism excludes the possibility of a true naturalization of the mental. But naturalization must include an explanation of content in atomistic and causal terms.

Fodor has made many and varied criticisms of holism. He identifies the central problem with all the different notions of holism as the idea that the determining factor in semantic evaluation is the notion of an "epistemic bond". Briefly, P is an epistemic bond of Q if the meaning of P is considered by someone to be relevant for the determination of the meaning of Q. Meaning holism strongly depends on this notion. The identity of the content of a mental state, under holism, can only be determined by the "totality" of its epistemic bonds. And this makes the realism of mental states an impossibility:If people differ in an absolutely general way in their estimations of epistemic relevance, and if we follow the holism of meaning and individuate intentional states by way of the "totality" of their epistemic bonds, the consequence will be that two people (or, for that matter, two temporal sections of the same person) will never be in the same intentional state. Therefore, two people can never be subsumed under the same intentional generalizations. And, therefore, intentional generalization can never be successful. And, therefore again, there is no hope for an intentional psychology.

Having criticized the idea that semantic evaluation concerns only the internal relations between the units of a symbolic system, Fodor can adopt an externalist position with respect to mental content and meaning. For Fodor, in recent years, the problem of naturalization of the mental is tied to the possibility of giving "the sufficient conditions for which a piece of the world is relative to (expresses, represents, is true of) another piece" in non-intentional and non-semantic terms. If this goal is to be achieved within a representational theory of the mind, then the challenge is to devise a causal theory which can establish the interpretation of the primitive non-logical symbols of the LOT. Fodor's initial proposal is that what determines that the symbol for "water" in Mentalese expresses the property HO is that the occurrences of that symbol are in certain causal relations with water. The intuitive version of this causal theory is what Fodor calls the "Crude Causal Theory". According to this theory, the occurrences of symbols express the properties which are the causes of their occurrence. The term "horse", for example, says of a horse that it is a horse. In order to do this, it is necessary and sufficient that certain properties of an occurrence of the symbol "horse" be in a law-like relation with certain properties which determine that something is an occurrence of "horse".

The main problem with this theory is that of erroneous representations. There are two unavoidable problems with the idea that "a symbol expresses a property if it is... necessary that all and only the presences of such a property cause the occurrences". The first is that not "all" horses cause occurrences of "horse". The second is that not "only" horses cause occurrences of "horse." Sometimes the "A"("horses") are caused by A (horses), but at other times—when, for example, because of the distance or conditions of low visibility, one has confused a cow for a horse—the "A" ("horses") are caused by B (cows). In this case the symbol "A" doesn’t express just the property A, but the disjunction of properties A or B. The crude causal theory is therefore incapable of distinguishing the case in which the content of a symbol is disjunctive from the case in which it isn’t. This gives rise to what Fodor calls the "problem of disjunction".

Fodor responds to this problem with what he defines as "a slightly less crude causal theory". According to this approach, it is necessary to break the symmetry at the base of the crude causal theory. Fodor must find some criterion for distinguishing the occurrences of "A" caused by As (true) from those caused by Bs (false). The point of departure, according to Fodor, is that while the false cases are "ontologically dependent" on the true cases, the reverse is not true. There is an asymmetry of dependence, in other words, between the true contents ("A"= A) and the false ones ("A" = A or B). The first can subsist independently of the second, but the second can occur only because of the existence of the first:From the point of view of semantics, errors must be "accidents": if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse". Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does "not" depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...

During the 1960s, various philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Fodor tried to resolve the puzzle of developing a way to preserve the explanatory efficacy of mental causation and so-called "folk psychology" while adhering to a materialist vision of the world which did not violate the "generality of physics". Their proposal was, first of all, to reject the then-dominant theories in philosophy of mind: behaviorism and the type identity theory. The problem with logical behaviorism was that it failed to account for causation "between" mental states and such causation seems to be essential to psychological explanation, especially if one considers that behavior is not an effect of a single mental event/cause but is rather the effect of a chain of mental events/causes. The type-identity theory, on the other hand, failed to explain the fact that radically different physical systems can find themselves in the identical mental state. Besides being deeply anthropocentric (why should humans be the only thinking organisms in the universe?), the identity-type theory also failed to deal with accumulating evidence in the neurosciences that every single human brain is different from all the others. Hence, the impossibility of referring to common mental states in different physical systems manifests itself not only between different species but also between organisms of the same species.
One can solve these problems, according to Fodor, with functionalism, a hypothesis which was designed to overcome the failings of both dualism and reductionism. What is important is the function of a mental state regardless of the physical substrate which implements it. The foundation for this view lies in the principle of the multiple realizability of the mental. Under this view, for example, I and a computer can both instantiate ("realize") the same functional state though we are made of completely different material stuff (see graphic at right). On this basis functionalism can be classified as a form of "token materialism".

Fodor co-authored the book "What Darwin Got Wrong" (2010) with the biolinguist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in which they describe neo-Darwinists as being "distressingly uncritical" and say of Darwin's theory of evolution that "it overestimates the contribution the environment makes in shaping the phenotype of a species and correspondingly underestimates the effects of endogenous variables." Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne describes this book as "a profoundly misguided critique of natural selection" and "as biologically uninformed as it is strident". Moral philosopher and anti-scientism author Mary Midgley praises "What Darwin Got Wrong" as "an overdue and valuable onslaught on neo-Darwinist simplicities". The book also received positive review by mathematician and Intelligent Design Theorist William Dembski.

A wide variety of philosophers of diverse orientations have challenged many of Fodor's ideas. For example, the language of thought hypothesis has been accused of either falling prey to an infinite regress or of being superfluous. Specifically, Simon Blackburn suggested in an article in 1984 that since Fodor explains the learning of natural languages as a process of formation and confirmation of hypotheses in the LOT, this leaves him open to the question of why the LOT itself should not be considered as just such a language which requires yet another and more fundamental representational substrate in which to form and confirm hypotheses so that the LOT itself can be learned. If natural language learning requires some representational substrate (the LOT) in order for "it" to be learned, why shouldn't the same be said for the LOT itself and then for the representational substrate of "this" representational substrate and so on, "ad infinitum"? On the other hand, if such a representational substrate is not required for the LOT, then why should it be required for the learning of natural languages? In this case, the LOT would be superfluous. Fodor, in response, argues that the LOT is unique in that it does not have to be learned via an antecedent language because it is innate.

In 1981 Daniel Dennett had formulated another argument against the LOT. Dennett suggested that it would seem, on the basis of the evidence of our behavior toward computers but also with regard to some of our own unconscious behavior, that explicit representation is not necessary for the explanation of propositional attitudes. During a game of chess with a computer program, we often attribute such attitudes to the computer, saying such things as "It thinks that the queen should be moved to the left." We attribute propositional attitudes to the computer and this helps us to explain and predict its behavior in various contexts. Yet no one would suggest that the computer is actually "thinking" or "believing" somewhere inside its circuits the equivalent of the propositional attitude "I believe I can kick this guy's butt" in Mentalese. The same is obviously true, suggests Dennett, of many of our everyday automatic behaviors such as "desiring to breathe clear air" in a stuffy environment.

Some linguists and philosophers of language have criticized Fodor's self-proclaimed "extreme" concept nativism. Kent Bach, for example, takes Fodor to task for his criticisms of lexical semantics and polysemy. Fodor claims that there is no lexical structure to such verbs as "keep", "get", "make" and "put". He suggests that, alternatively, "keep" simply expresses the concept KEEP (Fodor capitalizes concepts to distinguish them from properties, names or other such entities). If there is a straightforward one-to-one mapping between individual words and concepts, "keep your clothes on", "keep your receipt" and "keep washing your hands" will all share the same concept of KEEP under Fodor's theory. This concept presumably locks on to the unique external property of keeping. But, if this is true, then RETAIN must pick out a different property in RETAIN YOUR RECEIPT, since one can't retain one's clothes on or retain washing one's hands. Fodor's theory also has a problem explaining how the concept FAST contributes, "differently", to the contents of FAST CAR, FAST DRIVER, FAST TRACK, and FAST TIME. Whether or not the differing interpretations of "fast" in these sentences are specified in the semantics of English, or are the result of pragmatic inference, is a matter of debate. Fodor's own response to this kind of criticism is expressed bluntly in "Concepts": "People sometimes used to say that "exist" must be ambiguous because look at the difference between 'chairs exist' and 'numbers exist'. A familiar reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you don't also need 'exist' to be polysemic."

Some critics find it difficult to accept Fodor's insistence that a large, perhaps implausible, number of concepts are primitive and undefinable. For example, Fodor considers such concepts as EFFECT, ISLAND, TRAPEZOID, and WEEK to be all primitive, innate and unanalyzable because they all fall into the category of what he calls "lexical concepts" (those for which our language has a single word). Against this view, Bach argues that the concept VIXEN is almost certainly composed out of the concepts FEMALE and FOX, BACHELOR out of SINGLE and MALE, and so on.

One of his critics, Fiona Cowie, says that Fodor's innatism is "indicative of a certain degree of pessimism as to our prospects for understanding how a mind comes to be furnished," it just has the furniture it has.


How long did the The Professionals air?

The Professionals is a British crime-action television drama series produced by Avengers Mark1 Productions for London Weekend Television (LWT) that aired on the ITV network from 1977 to 1983. In all, 57 episodes were produced, filmed between 1977 and 1981. It starred Martin Shaw, Lewis Collins and Gordon Jackson as agents of the fictional "CI5" (Criminal Intelligence 5, alluding to the real-life MI5).

The Professionals (TV series)

"The Professionals" was created by Brian Clemens, who had been one of the driving forces behind "The Avengers". The show was originally to have been called "The A-Squad". Clemens and Albert Fennell were executive producers, with business partner Laurie Johnson providing the theme music. Sidney Hayers produced the first series in 1977, and Raymond Menmuir the remainder.

CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5) is a British law enforcement department, instructed by the Home Secretary to use any means to deal with crimes of a serious nature that go beyond the capacity of the police, but which are not tasks for the Security Service or the military.

The choice of CI5's name is possibly inspired by Criminal Investigation Department and MI5. The premise allowed the programme-makers to involve a wide variety of villains, including terrorists, hit-men, racist groups and espionage suspects, with plots sometimes relating to the Cold War. Led by the formidable George Cowley (Gordon Jackson), CI5 is known for using unconventional and sometimes illegal methods to beat criminals, or as Cowley put it "Fight fire with fire!" The use of a fictitious force in this context was somewhat less controversial than the portrayal of the real Flying Squad in "The Sweeney".

Cowley's two best agents are Ray Doyle (Martin Shaw) and William Bodie (Lewis Collins). Doyle is an ex-detective constable who has worked the seedier parts of London, while Bodie is an ex-paratrooper, mercenary and Special Air Service sergeant. Of the two, Doyle is the softer, compassionate and more thoughtful character, while Bodie is ruthless and more willing to take on criminals on their own terms. That said, Doyle is more hot-headed and tended to rush in, while Bodie waits for the shooting to start.

While polar opposites, Bodie and Doyle have a deep and enduring friendship, and are almost inseparable. Although their loyalty to Cowley is beyond question, they have no qualms about disobeying orders if it means getting the right result, either for the case or themselves.

Initially, Anthony Andrews was contracted to play Bodie, but he and Shaw did not have the chemistry that Clemens was looking for. As Shaw was deemed to have more'screen presence', Andrews was dropped, Clemens hiring Collins in his place. Shaw and Collins had played villains in a 1977 episode of "The New Avengers" ("Obsession") together, and reportedly had not got on with each other. Ironically, since this was the reason Collins was brought into the production, he and Shaw became friends off-screen, although they managed to keep up the on-screen chemistry and abrasiveness of Bodie and Doyle's relationship. The Collins character in "Obsession" signed off by saying "Maybe we should work together again. We're a good team." The first "Professionals" episode was produced later the same year.

Clemens intended to write two or three establishing episodes and then hand over to other writers, but their scripts were uneven and lacked the energy and pace needed. Clemens re-wrote nearly 10 scripts for the first-series episodes and took a direct hands-on approach to the filming. In later series, with the format established and the writers and directors familiar with the show, he took a more leisurely approach behind the scenes.

The early years of the show featured varied plots, good scripts and ongoing character development of Bodie and Doyle and to a lesser extent Cowley, but later series featured increasingly overused ideas and script devices, and both Collins and Shaw stated they felt the show was becoming stale. Although the final series was broadcast from November 1982 until February 1983, no episodes were filmed after May 1981.

Major George Cowley (Gordon Jackson) (born c. 1917) – Nicknamed "Morris" after the car of the same name. His operatives sometimes call him "The Cow", though not to his face. Founder and head of CI5, making him Bodie and Doyle's boss. As a young man he volunteered in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, where he was shot in the leg; this left him with a painful limp. Served as an officer in the British Army, where he attained the rank of major. He then worked in the secret services (including MI5) before being seconded to CI5 to form and manage the team. A confident and very experienced man, able to defend himself against physical and high-level political attacks. With many contacts and friends in high places, he is not afraid to clash with leaders of other services like Special Branch and MI5 or to speak his mind, being insolent even towards superiors, one of whom looked upon Cowley as "Not a Very Civil Civil Servant". Cowley's favourite tipple is single malt Scotch whisky.

Raymond Doyle (Martin Shaw) (born c. 1949), a former police detective constable, who originated in Derby but later lived in an unspecified "city" with parallels to Birmingham. He was working the seedier parts of east London when recruited into CI5. He took art classes, and appears to be musically inclined as well. An expert shot with a pistol, he also ran a karate class for the children on his beat. He was recruited by Cowley, and was made Bodie's partner shortly afterwards. Doyle is extremely intelligent and thoughtful but is also quick to anger, and his tendency to rush in often leaves Bodie having to race to the rescue. He is also more inclined to seek long-lasting relationships with women, and in one episode nearly married. Like Bodie he enjoyed football, but was a good cook and enjoyed a more healthy lifestyle. Doyle's bubble perm hairstyle and 1970s dress sense were actually chosen by Martin Shaw and his wife. In the episode "Hunter/Hunted", he is shown to live on Cliff Road in Camden.

William Andrew Philip Bodie (Lewis Collins) (born c. 1950) was a former paratrooper and Special Air Service (SAS) soldier. After leaving school aged 14, he joined the Merchant Navy and eventually ended up in Africa as a mercenary fighting bush wars. Noticed by Cowley during his SAS career, he was asked to join CI5 in 1975. Keen on parties, and a ladies' man, Bodie had a witty comment ready for almost every occasion. He was more immediately approachable than Doyle, and was generally relaxed and confident, although tending to hide his intelligence behind his hard-man image. Specialising in weaponry, martial arts and advanced driving, Bodie was the muscle of the three leads. He enjoyed football, cricket, drinking, and English literature.

The best-known car used by CI5 was the Ford Capri 3.0 S (primarily the Mark III model and one Mk II). Two were used: Bodie drove a silver version (1978–1981 episodes), Doyle a gold (1980–81 episodes), in the first season a silver Mk II with a black vinyl roof and a Series X bodykit was also briefly used, the first two cars mentioned still exist and were saved from being scrapped and restored in the 1990s, but the existence of the silver Mk II driven by Bodie is still uncertain and debated. Cowley used a latest model Ford Granada (1978–1981 Ghia model) while other Ford models such as a Ford Escort RS2000 (1978–79 episodes, driven by Doyle) and the Ford Cortina, particularly the Mark V (TF) model, were occasionally seen. However, in the first (1977) series, the cars used were mainly those of British Leyland, including a Rover SD1, a Rover P6, a Princess, a Triumph 2000, a Triumph Dolomite Sprint and a Triumph TR7. The SD1, a turmeric yellow 3500, bore the registration MOO 229R; in "The New Avengers" John Steed drove an identical-looking car with the number MOC 229P. The producers of "The Professionals" DVDs have speculated that these may in fact have been one and the same car.

However, reliability problems with the cars and BL requiring them back to give to the motoring press was causing disruption to filming. Midway through the first series, the supplier was then switched to Ford after they offered to provide vehicles for the production crew as well as for on-screen use. The first Ford to be prominent was a black 1600 Capri used by another CI5 agent, Tommy MacKay.

Many of the episodes featured some kind of car chase, a role for which the Capri, at least in terms of its market positioning, was particularly well-suited.

Bodie and Doyle originally carried 9 mm Inglis Hi-Power Mk.I pistols as their standard service sidearms for the first two series. They were issued.44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolvers when on bodyguard duties (as seen in the episode "Mixed Doubles"). In later series Bodie carried a.357 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 19 snub-nose revolver and Doyle often carried a 9 mm Walther P38 as their personal sidearms. George Cowley carried a.38-calibre Smith & Wesson Model 36 snub nose revolver.

The "A180 Laser Lock" sniper rifle (from Series 2, Episode 1; "Hunter/Hunted") was an AR-10 with a sight bracket on the carrying handle and a large laser projector under the barrel. A converted Thompson M1928 50-round drum mounted on the top of the barrel, supposedly the ammo supply, hid the battery pack. It was memorable as one of the first uses of a laser sight in visual media after the use of a similar weapon in the episode "Nightmare" in series 4 of "The Sweeney".

Another star of the show was the Pye PF8 UHF handheld radio, a genuine police radio of the times and not a prop as many believed, the radio actually more resembled an electric shaver of the times than a radio although it was a design well ahead of its time with an inbuilt antenna, dual microphones (top and bottom of the radio) these radios are highly sought after by fans of the show and radio hams who convert them to work on modern frequency bands.

The opening credits for the first series (broadcast 1977–78) starts with a Rolls-Royce speeding onto and through an industrial estate before skidding to a stop. As the Rolls-Royce enters and goes through the industrial estate, the title "The Professionals" appears on screen. Cowley, Bodie and Doyle get out of the vehicle and Bodie and Doyle then go through an assault course whilst being timed on a stopwatch by Cowley. It ends with them going through set windows and a close up of the stopwatch being stopped and Cowley standing by the car motioning them to get in. Just as the theme tune ends they get in the car and it drives off. The first two broadcast episodes of the series - "Private Madness, Public Danger" and "The Female Factor" - feature a voiceover by Cowley over the top of the title sequence but this was removed from the third episode ("Old Dog With New Tricks") onwards. When the first series has been repeated, all episodes (bar "When The Heat Cools Off" and the usually unscreened "Klansman") are shown using the more familiar title sequence employed for the second series onwards. This means that the Cowley voiceover is never married to the correct visuals on the repeat broadcasts of the episodes featuring it.

For the remaining series the opening titles started with a car driving through a tinted window before cutting to various shots of the main characters running and Cowley getting into a car before putting down a car phone in the back seat. We then see the green title card with CI5 written in big, black, stencil-style letters, "The Professionals" written in white over it and three yellow squares on the right hand side, each containing a silhouette of one of the three principal actors. It then zooms in on the top square and we see various shots of Gordon Jackson, followed by a pan to a close-up shot of a typewriter, and various shots of Martin Shaw running through an oil refinery and wielding a kendo stick. It then cuts to shots of Lewis Collins walking down a street, weightlifting, and using a punching bag, before cutting to a car driving through a dimly lit tunnel; Gordon Jackson walking out of a government building (10 Trinity Square, City of London); and the three of them walking down the street away from that building and towards the camera.

The whole sequence is fast-paced, hinting at the action to come within the programme itself.

Although depictions of actual bloodshed were scarce, the series was often criticised for its level of violence, with shootings, martial arts and asphyxiation a common means of assassination.

To help maximise the on-screen action, Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins were taught stunt driving skills and encouraged to propel their respective cars through streets as rapidly as possible, although LWT insisted that the stars had to be chauffeured when travelling to filming sets. In his last interview about the series, Brian Clemens laughed off the actors' claims about 'doing their own stunts' in the cars. He said that they had been taught little more than how to execute a handbrake turn. The British stuntman and stunt co-ordinator Peter Brayham did most of the precision driving, and with his dark curly hair, often stood in for Martin Shaw during the scenes where Doyle was driving. Shaw in particular, was known within the production team to be fairly inept with the cars. He was far too heavy on the brakes and throttle, regularly kerbed the cars, and often over-steered himself into trouble. This can be seen in many episodes. In the episode "Weekend in the Country", Gordon Jackson can be seen pulling away from a stationary position at the roadside, in a Chrysler Alpine. He can be seen pulling out without fully checking the traffic flow, directly in front of an approaching Volkswagen Beetle. This inevitably led to either an accident, or a dramatic near miss, but the editor obviously cut to the next scene at this point.

Some quarters of the British press seized on these aspects to insist that the programme was moronic and "comic-strip". However, reaction from other critics, including "The Times" and "The Daily Telegraph" newspapers, was more favourable.

The first series episode "Klansmen" was withdrawn in the UK, ostensibly due to its race-related subject matter. The episode has never been screened on terrestrial television in the UK, although it did screen uncut on the cable television channel Super-channel in 1987, and has been screened on free-to-air television in other countries including South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines. LWT refused to explain its view that while the episode remained unsuitable for British television viewers, it continued to be licensed to broadcasters in other countries.

The show was also criticised for political incorrectness. Mary Whitehouse, President of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, was among those who highlighted the occasional use of sexist and racist terms. At the time such dialogue was not seen as being disparaging towards minority groups. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the series was criticised by feminist groups. Yet, with the exception of "Klansmen", for which racist terms were a necessary part of the story, use of such terms in "The Professionals" was scarce in comparison to, for example, the 1970s police television programme "The Sweeney".

Martin Shaw was publicly critical of the series during its production, feeling he was playing a one-dimensional character in a one-dimensional show. Several years after the series ended London Weekend Television was contractually obliged to re-negotiate repeat fees with the lead actors. Unwilling to accede to Martin Shaw's demands, plans for further repeat screenings on the UK's ITV network had to be withdrawn, leading to Lewis Collins expressing his anger towards Shaw in an interview for the British press. However, Shaw eventually agreed to UK satellite screenings, although according to a "Radio Times" interview only after being discreetly made aware that Gordon Jackson's widow, actress Rona Anderson (who guested in "Cry Wolf"), was suffering financial difficulties after her husband's death and needed the repeat fees.

Episodes were shown on terrestrial TV as part of special occasions, such as a general overview of ITV's history; LWT, which produced the series, repeated a selection of episodes from the series in the early 1990s, although was the only region to do so. It was not until 2008 that the series gained a re-run on ITV4. "The Professionals" has also been regularly shown on cable TV.

The entire series was regularly screened on the now-defunct Granada Plus channel from 1997, where it was consistently the channel's highest-rated show, initially achieving close to one million viewers. The episodes shown were heavily edited to make them suitable for daytime viewing and it is these same prints that are being used for transmission on ITV4. Neither station screened the "Klansmen" episode, stating that London Weekend Television continued to forbid its transmission.

In 1987, ITV was re-running some episodes. After the Hungerford shooting incident the particular episode that was to be aired, "Lawson's Last Stand", had a theme that was deemed insensitive and was replaced by the less violent "The Untouchables".

After the series ended, ITV produced "Dempsey and Makepeace" as its replacement, while Raymond Menmuir produced "Special Squad" for Australia's Network Ten in the mid-1980s, following "The Professionals"' format. A revival series, "" was produced for Sky in the late 1990s and starred Edward Woodward, but it was not a success. The BBC introduced "Spender" in the early 1990s, which featured several "Professionals" influenced themes. The BBC television series Spooks that was broadcast in 2002 also had a fact action style inspired by The Professionals.

"" was a British crime drama that aired on the Sky 1 satellite channel from 19 September to 19 December 1999. An updating of the original show, the series is set in a fictional government agency "CI5" (Civilian Intelligence department 5 as opposed to MI5, Military Intelligence).

The original group of three men (Doyle, Bodie and their boss Cowley) were replaced by a new group of three men and a woman:

The team were responsible to a minister, played by Charlotte Cornwell.

In a similar manner to the original series the show included action sequences, often in a James Bond style. However, the show was not a ratings success and only lasted one series. It did not transfer to terrestrial television in the UK.

In the popular TV comedy series "The Two Ronnies", Ronnie Corbett played a bungling version of Martin Shaw's Doyle in a sketch called "Tinker Tailor Smiley Doyle" (Series 11; broadcast February 1985 - March 1985). This was a joint send-up of "The Professionals" and the "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" TV drama, with Ronnie Barker playing George Smiley along the lines of Alec Guinness' portrayal in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". Corbett's Doyle provides the brawn to the brains of Barker's Smiley and actually comes out the worse. The sketch guest-starred Frank Williams from "Dad's Army".

In 1984 some of the team behind "The Comic Strip" TV series produced a spoof entitled "The Bullshitters", featuring two characters called Bonehead and Foyle in an episode called 'Roll Out the Gun Barrel".

Bonehead and Foyle returned to TV screens in 1993 in "The Comic Strip" one-off "Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown" alongside 'Shouting George from The Weeny' (Jack Regan from "The Sweeney"), 'Spanker' ("Spender") and 'Jason Bentley' ("Department S"'s Jason King).

Peter Jackson's 1987 film, "Bad Taste", featured Astro Investigation and Defence Service employees "the boys", a Doyle and Bodie parody complete with Ford Capri.

In 1996 Nissan cars ran a popular comedy spoof TV advertisement based on the series, featuring Phil Cornwell playing Doyle and Ray Trickett playing Bodie, testing out its new release, the Nissan Almera.

In Series 1, Episode 2 of "Harry Hill's TV Burp", Harry in a sketch parodying "The Bill" is dressed as a Police Officer and Superintendent Okaro and DC Carver find something suspicious about him and search him and find a CI5 ID card.

The programme and its characters were repeatedly referenced in the third series of "Ashes to Ashes", which took place in 1983. DCI Gene Hunt tells DI Alex Drake, "We're a team: Bodie and Doyle. I'm the one in the SAS; you can be the one with the girl's hair." DC Chris Skelton, with sunglasses and a sawn-off shotgun in front of PC Sharon Granger, similarly likens himself to Lewis Collins; Granger ultimately tells Skelton she loves him, not Lewis Collins.

Since it was first broadcast in Germany in 1981, the show ("Die Profis") has become a cult there. During its broadcast run, the public television service ZDF, due to concerns over politics and violence, did not air all episodes of the programme, so "The Professionals" became one of the first TV shows ever to be released on VHS in Germany in the 1980s. However, only the unaired episodes were released on tape. In all, 14 episodes were withdrawn from broadcast.

"The Professionals" was one of a few series from the West broadcast in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. It gained a cult following there very quickly. Originally, only a selection of 21 of the 57 episodes was bought, including "Klansmen". The first dubbed episode "When the Heat Cools Off" was spoken by (Bodie), (Doyle) and Jiří Adamíra (Cowley). Štěpánek soon emigrated so the remainder were dubbed by Alois Švehlík.

The whole series was broadcast after 1994 on TV Nova. Petr Oliva continued to dub Bodie but Doyle was dubbed by Karel Heřmánek and Cowley by Otakar Brousek, since Adamíra had died.

From 1978 to 1982 Sphere Books released 15 paperback novels to accompany the series. These adapted 38 of the show's 57 episodes. Seven were also published in hardcover editions: Nos. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 15 by Severn House and 3 and 4 by Arthur Barker.
‡ All the paperback novelisations published by Sphere Books were credited to the pen name "Ken Blake". The majority were actually adapted from the original episode shooting scripts by science fiction author Kenneth Bulmer, although the volumes marked † where adapted by fantasy author Robert Holdstock. Five of the seven hardcover editions were credited to Kenneth Bulmer. This included, presumably erroneously, the 15th novel. The two Arthur Barker hardbacks were credited to Ken Blake.

From 1979-1985 Grandreams Ltd published seven annuals to accompany the series.

Contrary to popular belief, the original release on VHS was not blocked by Martin Shaw. According to Dave Matthews' website, Shaw had already signed the video release agreement, it was the repeat fee amount offered by LWT that he objected to.

In the late 1990s, the complete run of 57 episodes were given a UK VHS videocassette release by Contender Entertainment Group. An earlier release had seen 31 episodes issued before the distributor went out of business.

In 2002, Contender reissued the complete run on DVD (for the UK only). Although labelled as having been "digitally remastered", these releases have attracted some criticism, mainly due to the relatively poor picture quality (colour, contrast and levels of dirt and scratches). In part, this was due to problems with the age and condition of the prints used, and the loss of (or lack of access to) the original source footage which would normally be used as the basis of a remaster.

In late 2005, Contender replaced the original DVD releases with a new set which saw some minor improvements in the picture quality.

On 2 September 2013, Network Distributing announced that it had acquired the scripts, production files, master video recordings and stills from the show. The digitally remastered version of "The Professionals" was released on DVD and Blu-ray. The restoration process is described in a blog post. Series 1 episodes have had the original opening and closing sequences restored.

"The Professionals" is available in Australia (Region 4 DVD) in four boxed sets ('dossiers') containing the complete series. These are distributed by Umbrella Entertainment and are available via online DVD shops such as EzyDVD JB Hifi Online and MoviesPlus. The four dossiers feature the same episodes per box set as the UK Contender release with a couple of changes in running order in dossiers 2 and 4."

In 2009, author Bob Rocca published a book entitled "The Professionals", a chronological account of every episode including cast lists and production credits. The book is also a comprehensive guide to merchandised products, from toys to magazines and includes over 200 black and white photographs as well as extensive interviews with actors, producers, writers, directors and other production team members, discussing their work on the series. This publication was also foreworded and given official endorsement by series creator Brian Clemens.

In 2004 plans were being drawn up for a film version of "The Professionals" with Lewis Collins approached to play the part of Cowley, but after negotiations broke down the film was abandoned.

In 2011, film company Lionsgate announced it had acquired the rights to "The Professionals" series and intended to begin shooting a movie in 2011. The characters of Bodie, Doyle and Cowley would be played by new actors.
The film would have been a prequel to the 1970s series concerning how Bodie and Doyle entered CI5.