Jerry Fodor on mental architecture
Encyclopedia
Jerry Fodor
is notable for his important and influential ideas on a hypothesized "structure" of the mind or, what has often been called mental architecture.
’s criticism of language learning must be extended to cover all essential aspects of thought. In his The Language of Thought of 1975, Fodor presented his "impossibility thesis" with regard to the gradual acquisition of concepts. Suppose you are a child in the first stage of such a process of acquisition and you must try to learn the concept X, a concept of the second stage. If something is a second-stage concept, then it cannot be coextensive with any first-stage concept, otherwise there would be no distinction in expressive power between the first and the second stages, and no basis at all for such a hierarchy of learning stages. But if you are a child who cannot represent the extension of a second-stage concept in terms of the extension of some first-stage concept you are already familiar with, then you cannot represent the extension of that second-stage concept X at all because the first-stage concepts are all that you have at your disposal. And if you cannot represent the extension of the concept, then you cannot learn the concept because the learning of a concept implies the projection and confirmation of the biconditionals that determine that the extension of the concept has been learned. The conclusion is that either higher-stage concepts are indeed representable in terms of (reducible to) lower-stage concepts (in which case there is no basis for the distinctions between stages and the hierarchy crumbles with no actual learning taking place) or there are concepts in the higher-level stages that cannot be represented in the lower-stages, in which case the child cannot learn them. Fodor’s conclusion is that an "extreme innatism
" concerning concepts is necessary to explain learning. He will accept, for example, that the complex concept AIRPLANE may be composed out of simpler concepts such as FLYING and MACHINE. But he insists that the human mind is "richly endowed" with many fairly complex concepts such as Machine from birth. This view has been strongly contested.
In The Modularity of Mind, Fodor makes another crucial distinction between his approach to the mental and that of Chomsky. He attributes to Chomsky (and other so-called neo-Cartesian
s) the view that what are actually innate are (only) the intentional objects of propositional attitude
s: the content expressed by the sentences of the language of thought
. This, however, flies in the face of Chomsky’s own writings, which have emphasized the existence of organ
s of the mind similar in structure and function to the modules talked about by Fodor. In any case, Fodor suggests, in this work, that his approach, unlike the others, attempts to explain what is required, other than content, to give rise to behaviour:
The connection between functional architecture and content is therefore required in order to explain one of the most relevant questions of the program of naturalization
of the mental and the explanation of behaviour in causal
terms.
Fodor thinks that a (moderately) modular view of the structure of the mind is necessary to explain the strong degree of autonomy from the central system that certain properties of perception demonstrate. He cites the case of experiments that demonstrate the specificity of domain of the mechanisms that act during the analysis of phonetic information
. These experiments apparently demonstrate that the mechanisms of phonetic analysis are exclusively sensible to acoustic sequences of speech. But, according to Fodor, what really distinguishes modules from central processes is what he calls informational encapsulation. This is roughly the thesis that modules are much less open and permeable to background knowledge and beliefs on the part of the individual. Fodor uses the persistence of perceptual illusion
s to illustrate his thesis. Illusions, such as Müller-Lyer
tend to persist long after a subject has been exposed to them and has learned that the two lines are, in fact, equal in length. The knowledge that the two lines are equal is cognitively available and constitutes part of his background knowledge, which he can access consciously at any time. Nevertheless, when looking at the rods, one still effectively sees them as uneven and the illusion persists. This suggests to Fodor that basic perceptual modules are partly closed off from the cognitive background knowledge of the subject: modules are informationally encapsulated.
The study of perception is of fundamental importance for illustrating the connection between functional architecture and the theory of mental content. The fact that perception exhibits characteristics of autonomy and independence from central processes (and that it is relatively impenetrable to background knowledge) can be posted at the base of a theoretical conception able to mediate between internalist conceptions (hence preserving representational realism) and externalist
conceptions (hence allowing for a causal-informational conception) of mental content.
Fodor’s proposal is characterized by the attempt to converge the causal conception with the inferential thesis of perception. His goal is to break the bond between the inferential thesis and the thesis of the dependence of perception on the system of beliefs/desires of individuals. Basing itself on the importance of background knowledge in perceptual processes, the inferential conception has been utilized in favour of the epistemic hypothesis of perception. This hypothesis fits perfectly with the inferential thesis because it explains the derivation of the hypotheses that the perceptual system projects on the proximal stimulus. The result is a notion of the cognitive permeability of perception: seeing is an interpretive act that depends on the background knowledge of the subject. According to Fodor, however, it is possible to adhere to the inferential thesis without having to subscribe to the idea of cognitive permeability. From the fact that perceptual processes are inferential it does not follow that they must have access to the background knowledge of subjects. But, in order for all of this to work, perceptual systems must be "specialized" and "encapsulated." Our best theory of perception, therefore, seems to require a modular organization of the mind.
criticize the conception of perception proposed by James J. Gibson in 1979. The so-called ecological approach is in sharp contrast with the Establishment Theory maintained by cognitivists. The cognitivist thesis considers perception precisely to be a form of inference (seeing IS making hypotheses about the world). Three factors are necessary in order to sustain this thesis: memory, representation and a mechanism of elaboration able to transform—according to certain rules—some representations (premises) into other representations (conclusions). The reference to representations renders perception a mediated process that is highly indirect. Against this, Gibson proposes an hypothesis of perception capable, in his view, of doing without these three factors (and which is therefore qualified as direct . To perceive, in his hypothesis, is to directly gather, without any representational intermediation, the invariant properties of the environment. But what are these properties?
Fodor points out that in order to avoid a "trivialization problem" (that is, the possibility that anything can be counted as an invariant property), Gibson must offer some criterion capable of tying together the gathering of information and the environmental invariants:
An illuminating example of the argumentative circularity that underlies the attempt to tie "direct grasping" to the invariant properties of objects can be seen in one of the key points of Gibson’s theory, according to Fodor. This is the thesis according to which the privileged invariants of objects are a sort of "affordances," or dispositional properties (being eaten, being grasped, being launched, etc.), which the objects offer to the organisms they come into ecological contact with. Against this hypothesis, Fodor shows that such "affordances" presuppose direct perception and cannot be used to explain it.
The impossibility of direct perception of distal objects makes it necessary, according to Fodor, to adopt an inferential theory (necessarily mediated and indirect) of perception. The computational mechanism at the base of inferential processes is represented by the transducers. These are the mechanisms capable of providing a representation (in atomic structures of the LOT) of the dispositions of distal objects on the basis of the properties of the proximal stimulus. Given the huge gap between proximal stimulus and distal object, it isn’t possible to propose a direct conception of perception (every perception is mediated by the representations that bridge the gap between distal object and proximal stimulus). Fodor’s conception remains within the context of the representational theory of the mind. Gibson, in his view, fails to clear the field of this theory because it is basically ineliminable, given that all of the semantic questions of perception seem to necessarily refer to it.
Fodor also addresses the problem of intentionality, one of the central aspects of the question of perceptual content, which seems to be insoluble from the point of view of Gibson’s theory. The key point of Fodor’s criticism of the thesis of direct perception is that, given the same identical stimulus, we are able to form many different representations of the same object (seeing it as the morning star or as the evening star) and this in turn will tend to give rise to different behaviours. Even though there is a sense in which we see merely extensionally, therefore, seeing is substantially intentional. And the intentional aspects are, in fact, those that have causal relevance in any explanation of human behaviour. Inference, representation and intentionality seem to be, Fodor believes, intimately related. Gibson’s problems arise from not having comprehended this fact.
If the question of intentionality is the critical notion in Fodor’s criticism of Gibson, in Observation Reconsidered the same notion plays a specular role: the limitation of the interpretationalist conception of perception. The question regards the fixation of beliefs. Traditionally, theories in this area tend to concentrate on two hypotheses: those that privilege the perceptual aspects and consider the fixation of beliefs to be dependent on perception and, therefore, on the relation with the external world; and those that, privileging instead the inferential relation between old and new beliefs, consider the fixation of beliefs to be substantially a process internal to the organism. While Fodor admits that the internal relation between beliefs has an enormous value, he maintains that this aspect has been overemphasized in recent philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Fodor’s intent is to try to re-establish a just equilibrium between interpretation and observation.
The interpretationalist theories have a strong and consolidated tradition behind them. Ludwig Wittgenstein
in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) distinguished between seeing that and seeing as using the well known experiment of ambiguous figures (Jastrow
's duck-rabbit). Ambiguous figures force us to confront the fact that perception cannot be determined exclusively by sensory stimuli: given the same stimuli, it is possible to give two (or more) different interpretations of the same retinal configuration. Processes of interpretation are necessary in order to give sense to mere sensory stimulation. One author who has strongly insisted on this point is Jerome Bruner
(1957), one of the founders of the New Look in the psychology of vision. The most radical thesis in this regard, however, is that which, above all in linguistics and anthropology, has taken on the name of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
. This hypothesis asserts that every perceptual act is determined and constituted by the entire web of beliefs of the individual (in fact, by his whole culture). This is a strongly holistic position, which Fodor vehemently opposes and criticises. The tight relation between the interpretationalist hypothesis and holistic conceptions of belief is at the base of the idea of the dependence of perception on theory. This idea has profound repercussions also in epistemology. Thomas Kuhn
(1962), Norwood Russell Hanson
(1958) and Nelson Goodman
(1968), for example, maintain that the perception of the world depends on how the percipient conceives the world: two individuals (two scientists) who witness the same phenomenon and are steeped in two radically different theories will see two radically different things. It is our interpretation of the world, in this view, which determines what we see.
Fodor attempts to establish that this theoretical paradigm is fallacious and misleading by demonstrating the impenetrability of perception to the background knowledge of subjects.
The strongest case can be based on the evidence from experimental cognitive psychology itself: the persistence of perceptual illusions. Just knowing that the two horizontal lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion are equal does not prevent one from continuing to see them as one being longer than the other. It is this impenetrability of the information elaborated by the mental modules (informationally encapsulated) that limits the extent of interpretationalism.
The criticism of the interpretationalist hypothesis accounts for the common sense intuition (at the base of naïve physics) of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the epistemic subject. If the processes of elaboration of the mental modules are independent of the background theories, in fact, then it is possible to maintain the realist view that two scientists who embrace two radically diverse theories see the world exactly in the same manner even if they interpret it differently. The point is that is necessary to distinguish between observations and the perceptual fixation of beliefs. While it is beyond doubt that the second process involves the holistic relation between beliefs, the first is largely independent of the background beliefs of individuals.
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
is notable for his important and influential ideas on a hypothesized "structure" of the mind or, what has often been called mental architecture.
Fodor and Chomsky
Fodor maintains that Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
’s criticism of language learning must be extended to cover all essential aspects of thought. In his The Language of Thought of 1975, Fodor presented his "impossibility thesis" with regard to the gradual acquisition of concepts. Suppose you are a child in the first stage of such a process of acquisition and you must try to learn the concept X, a concept of the second stage. If something is a second-stage concept, then it cannot be coextensive with any first-stage concept, otherwise there would be no distinction in expressive power between the first and the second stages, and no basis at all for such a hierarchy of learning stages. But if you are a child who cannot represent the extension of a second-stage concept in terms of the extension of some first-stage concept you are already familiar with, then you cannot represent the extension of that second-stage concept X at all because the first-stage concepts are all that you have at your disposal. And if you cannot represent the extension of the concept, then you cannot learn the concept because the learning of a concept implies the projection and confirmation of the biconditionals that determine that the extension of the concept has been learned. The conclusion is that either higher-stage concepts are indeed representable in terms of (reducible to) lower-stage concepts (in which case there is no basis for the distinctions between stages and the hierarchy crumbles with no actual learning taking place) or there are concepts in the higher-level stages that cannot be represented in the lower-stages, in which case the child cannot learn them. Fodor’s conclusion is that an "extreme innatism
Innatism
Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed...
" concerning concepts is necessary to explain learning. He will accept, for example, that the complex concept AIRPLANE may be composed out of simpler concepts such as FLYING and MACHINE. But he insists that the human mind is "richly endowed" with many fairly complex concepts such as Machine from birth. This view has been strongly contested.
In The Modularity of Mind, Fodor makes another crucial distinction between his approach to the mental and that of Chomsky. He attributes to Chomsky (and other so-called neo-Cartesian
Neo-Cartesian
Philosophers and psychologists are described as being neo-Cartesian if they posit 'mind stuff' as being different from 'brain stuff' and if they posit 'internal cognitive states' as having causal powers. Some philosophers Philosophers and psychologists are described as being neo-Cartesian if they...
s) the view that what are actually innate are (only) the intentional objects of propositional attitude
Propositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...
s: the content expressed by the sentences of the language of thought
Language of thought
In philosophy of mind, the language of thought hypothesis put forward by American philosopher Jerry Fodor describes thoughts as represented in a "language" that allows complex thoughts to be built up by combining simpler thoughts in various ways...
. This, however, flies in the face of Chomsky’s own writings, which have emphasized the existence of organ
Organ (anatomy)
In biology, an organ is a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function. Usually there is a main tissue and sporadic tissues . The main tissue is the one that is unique for the specific organ. For example, main tissue in the heart is the myocardium, while sporadic are...
s of the mind similar in structure and function to the modules talked about by Fodor. In any case, Fodor suggests, in this work, that his approach, unlike the others, attempts to explain what is required, other than content, to give rise to behaviour:
- "If you say '19' when I say '7 plus 12, please', your reply could undoubtedly be explained in part in reference to your knowledge of numbers. But this is not enough, given that, after all, knowledge does not translate into behaviour in virtue of only the content of propositions. It seems evident that mechanisms are needed which put into action that which is known, mechanisms which have the function of making the organization of behaviour conform to the propositional structures which are known."
The connection between functional architecture and content is therefore required in order to explain one of the most relevant questions of the program of naturalization
Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
of the mental and the explanation of behaviour in causal
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
terms.
Why modularity matters
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
. These experiments apparently demonstrate that the mechanisms of phonetic analysis are exclusively sensible to acoustic sequences of speech. But, according to Fodor, what really distinguishes modules from central processes is what he calls informational encapsulation. This is roughly the thesis that modules are much less open and permeable to background knowledge and beliefs on the part of the individual. Fodor uses the persistence of perceptual illusion
Illusion
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people....
s to illustrate his thesis. Illusions, such as Müller-Lyer
Mueller-Lyer illusion
The Müller-Lyer illusion is an optical illusion consisting of a stylized arrow. When viewers are asked to place a mark on the figure at the mid-point, they invariably place it more towards the "tail" end. It was devised by F.C. Müller-Lyer in 1889....
tend to persist long after a subject has been exposed to them and has learned that the two lines are, in fact, equal in length. The knowledge that the two lines are equal is cognitively available and constitutes part of his background knowledge, which he can access consciously at any time. Nevertheless, when looking at the rods, one still effectively sees them as uneven and the illusion persists. This suggests to Fodor that basic perceptual modules are partly closed off from the cognitive background knowledge of the subject: modules are informationally encapsulated.
The study of perception is of fundamental importance for illustrating the connection between functional architecture and the theory of mental content. The fact that perception exhibits characteristics of autonomy and independence from central processes (and that it is relatively impenetrable to background knowledge) can be posted at the base of a theoretical conception able to mediate between internalist conceptions (hence preserving representational realism) and externalist
Externalism
Externalism is a group of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that the mind is not only the result of what is going on inside the nervous system but also of what either occur or exist outside the subject. It is often contrasted with internalism which holds that the mind emerges out of...
conceptions (hence allowing for a causal-informational conception) of mental content.
Fodor’s proposal is characterized by the attempt to converge the causal conception with the inferential thesis of perception. His goal is to break the bond between the inferential thesis and the thesis of the dependence of perception on the system of beliefs/desires of individuals. Basing itself on the importance of background knowledge in perceptual processes, the inferential conception has been utilized in favour of the epistemic hypothesis of perception. This hypothesis fits perfectly with the inferential thesis because it explains the derivation of the hypotheses that the perceptual system projects on the proximal stimulus. The result is a notion of the cognitive permeability of perception: seeing is an interpretive act that depends on the background knowledge of the subject. According to Fodor, however, it is possible to adhere to the inferential thesis without having to subscribe to the idea of cognitive permeability. From the fact that perceptual processes are inferential it does not follow that they must have access to the background knowledge of subjects. But, in order for all of this to work, perceptual systems must be "specialized" and "encapsulated." Our best theory of perception, therefore, seems to require a modular organization of the mind.
Gibson and the inferential thesis
So why is the inferential thesis necessary for Fodor and how does he justify it? In an article called How Direct is Visual Perception: Some Reflections on Gibson’s "Ecological Approach", Fodor and Zenon PylyshynZenon Pylyshyn
Zenon Pylyshyn is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher.He holds degrees in Engineering-Physics from McGill University and in Control Systems and Experimental Psychology , both from the University of Saskatchewan. His dissertation was on the application of information theory to studies...
criticize the conception of perception proposed by James J. Gibson in 1979. The so-called ecological approach is in sharp contrast with the Establishment Theory maintained by cognitivists. The cognitivist thesis considers perception precisely to be a form of inference (seeing IS making hypotheses about the world). Three factors are necessary in order to sustain this thesis: memory, representation and a mechanism of elaboration able to transform—according to certain rules—some representations (premises) into other representations (conclusions). The reference to representations renders perception a mediated process that is highly indirect. Against this, Gibson proposes an hypothesis of perception capable, in his view, of doing without these three factors (and which is therefore qualified as direct . To perceive, in his hypothesis, is to directly gather, without any representational intermediation, the invariant properties of the environment. But what are these properties?
Fodor points out that in order to avoid a "trivialization problem" (that is, the possibility that anything can be counted as an invariant property), Gibson must offer some criterion capable of tying together the gathering of information and the environmental invariants:
- Suppose that under certain circumstances people can correctly perceive that certain things in their environment are of the type P. Since it is not possible to correctly perceive something of the type P unless it really is P, it is always trivially true that the things that can be perceived as P share an invariant property: their being P. Now, since, according to Gibson, what people do when they perceive is directly gather an appropriate invariant, for every perceptual result the following pseudo-explanation will always be valid: to perceive that something is P is to gather the invariant property P that the things of this type have.
An illuminating example of the argumentative circularity that underlies the attempt to tie "direct grasping" to the invariant properties of objects can be seen in one of the key points of Gibson’s theory, according to Fodor. This is the thesis according to which the privileged invariants of objects are a sort of "affordances," or dispositional properties (being eaten, being grasped, being launched, etc.), which the objects offer to the organisms they come into ecological contact with. Against this hypothesis, Fodor shows that such "affordances" presuppose direct perception and cannot be used to explain it.
The impossibility of direct perception of distal objects makes it necessary, according to Fodor, to adopt an inferential theory (necessarily mediated and indirect) of perception. The computational mechanism at the base of inferential processes is represented by the transducers. These are the mechanisms capable of providing a representation (in atomic structures of the LOT) of the dispositions of distal objects on the basis of the properties of the proximal stimulus. Given the huge gap between proximal stimulus and distal object, it isn’t possible to propose a direct conception of perception (every perception is mediated by the representations that bridge the gap between distal object and proximal stimulus). Fodor’s conception remains within the context of the representational theory of the mind. Gibson, in his view, fails to clear the field of this theory because it is basically ineliminable, given that all of the semantic questions of perception seem to necessarily refer to it.
Fodor also addresses the problem of intentionality, one of the central aspects of the question of perceptual content, which seems to be insoluble from the point of view of Gibson’s theory. The key point of Fodor’s criticism of the thesis of direct perception is that, given the same identical stimulus, we are able to form many different representations of the same object (seeing it as the morning star or as the evening star) and this in turn will tend to give rise to different behaviours. Even though there is a sense in which we see merely extensionally, therefore, seeing is substantially intentional. And the intentional aspects are, in fact, those that have causal relevance in any explanation of human behaviour. Inference, representation and intentionality seem to be, Fodor believes, intimately related. Gibson’s problems arise from not having comprehended this fact.
The limits of interpretation
The interpretationalist theories have a strong and consolidated tradition behind them. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) distinguished between seeing that and seeing as using the well known experiment of ambiguous figures (Jastrow
Joseph Jastrow
Joseph Jastrow was an American psychologist, noted for inventions in experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psycho-physics. Jastrow was one of the first scientists to study the evolution of language, publishing an article on the topic in 1886...
's duck-rabbit). Ambiguous figures force us to confront the fact that perception cannot be determined exclusively by sensory stimuli: given the same stimuli, it is possible to give two (or more) different interpretations of the same retinal configuration. Processes of interpretation are necessary in order to give sense to mere sensory stimulation. One author who has strongly insisted on this point is Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Seymour Bruner is an American psychologist who has contributed to cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology, as well as to history and to the general philosophy of education. Bruner is currently a senior research fellow at the New York University School...
(1957), one of the founders of the New Look in the psychology of vision. The most radical thesis in this regard, however, is that which, above all in linguistics and anthropology, has taken on the name of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Linguistic relativity
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
. This hypothesis asserts that every perceptual act is determined and constituted by the entire web of beliefs of the individual (in fact, by his whole culture). This is a strongly holistic position, which Fodor vehemently opposes and criticises. The tight relation between the interpretationalist hypothesis and holistic conceptions of belief is at the base of the idea of the dependence of perception on theory. This idea has profound repercussions also in epistemology. Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.Kuhn...
(1962), Norwood Russell Hanson
Norwood Russell Hanson
Norwood Russell Hanson was a philosopher of science. Hanson was a pioneer in advancing the argument that observation is theory-laden – that observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven – and that historical and contemporary comprehension are similarly deeply interwoven...
(1958) and Nelson Goodman
Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.-Career:...
(1968), for example, maintain that the perception of the world depends on how the percipient conceives the world: two individuals (two scientists) who witness the same phenomenon and are steeped in two radically different theories will see two radically different things. It is our interpretation of the world, in this view, which determines what we see.
Fodor attempts to establish that this theoretical paradigm is fallacious and misleading by demonstrating the impenetrability of perception to the background knowledge of subjects.
The strongest case can be based on the evidence from experimental cognitive psychology itself: the persistence of perceptual illusions. Just knowing that the two horizontal lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion are equal does not prevent one from continuing to see them as one being longer than the other. It is this impenetrability of the information elaborated by the mental modules (informationally encapsulated) that limits the extent of interpretationalism.
The criticism of the interpretationalist hypothesis accounts for the common sense intuition (at the base of naïve physics) of the independence of reality from the conceptual categories of the epistemic subject. If the processes of elaboration of the mental modules are independent of the background theories, in fact, then it is possible to maintain the realist view that two scientists who embrace two radically diverse theories see the world exactly in the same manner even if they interpret it differently. The point is that is necessary to distinguish between observations and the perceptual fixation of beliefs. While it is beyond doubt that the second process involves the holistic relation between beliefs, the first is largely independent of the background beliefs of individuals.