Modularity of mind is the notion that a
mindMind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself...
may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established,
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
arily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
's concept of a
universalUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
,
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
. Such universal features of language imply the existence of an underlying "
language acquisition deviceLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
" structure in the brain. This device is postulated to be autonomous and specialized for learning language rapidly – a module.
Historically, questions regarding the
functional architecture of the mind have been divided into two
different theories of the nature of the faculties.
Modularity of mind is the notion that a
mindMind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself...
may, at least in part, be composed of separate innate structures which have established,
evolutionIn biology, evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. Though changes produced in any one generation are normally small, differences accumulate with each generation and can, over time, cause substantial changes in the population, a...
arily developed functional purposes. Proponents believe this view is implied by
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
's concept of a
universalUniversal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
,
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
. Such universal features of language imply the existence of an underlying "
language acquisition deviceLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
" structure in the brain. This device is postulated to be autonomous and specialized for learning language rapidly – a module.
Fodor's Modularity of Mind
Historically, questions regarding the
functional architecture of the mind have been divided into two
different theories of the nature of the faculties. The first can be characterized as a horizontal view because it refers to mental processes as if they are
interactions between faculties such as memory, imagination, judgement, and perception, which are not
domain specificDomain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices...
(e.g., a judgement remains a judgement whether it refers to a perceptual experience or to the comprehension of language). The second can be characterized as a vertical view because it claims that the mental faculties are differentiated on the basis of domain specificity, are genetically determined, are associated with distinct neurological structures, and are computationally autonomous.
The vertical vision goes back to the 19th century movement called
phrenologyPhrenology is a hypothesis stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull. It is now considered a pseudoscience. Developed by German physician Franz Joseph Gall in 1796, the discipline was very popular in the 19th century...
and its founder
Franz Joseph GallFranz Joseph Gall was a neuroanatomist, physiologist, and pioneer in the study of the localization of mental functions in the brain....
, who claimed that the individual mental faculties could be associated precisely, in a sort of one to one correspondence, 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, of course, been disproven over the course of the last century.
In the 1980s, however,
Jerry FodorJerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is also the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the modularity of...
revived the idea of the modularity of mind, although without the notion of precise physical localizability. Drawing from Chomsky and other work in
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
as well as from the
philosophy of mindPhilosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
and the implications of
optical illusionAn optical illusion is characterized by visually perceived images that differ from objective reality. The information gathered by the eye is processed in the brain to give a percept that does not tally with a physical measurement of the stimulus source...
s, he became one of its most articulate proponents with the 1983 publication of
Modularity of Mind.
According to Fodor, a module falls somewhere between the behaviorist and cognitivist views of lower-level processes.
BehavioristsBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
tried to replace the mind with reflexes which Fodor describes as encapsulated (cognitively impenetrable or unaffected by other cognitive domains) and non-inferential (straight pathways with no information added). Low level processes are unlike reflexes in that they are inferential. This can be demonstrated by poverty of the stimulus arguments in which the proximate stimulus, that which is initially received by the brain (such as the 2D image received by the retina), cannot account for the resulting output (for example, our 3D perception of the world), thus necessitating some form of computation.
In contrast,
cognitivistsIn psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical approach in understanding the mind using quantitative, positivist and scientific methods, that describes mental functions as information processing models.-Theoretical approach:...
saw lower level processes as continuous with higher level processes, being inferential and cognitively penetrable (influenced by other cognitive domains, such as beliefs). The latter has been shown to be untrue in some cases, such as with many visual illusions (ex. Müller-Lyer illusion), which can persist despite a person’s awareness of their existence. This is taken to indicate that other domains, including one’s beliefs, cannot influence such processes.
Fodor arrives at the conclusion that such processes are inferential like higher order processes and encapsulated in the same sense as reflexes.
Although he argued for the modularity of 'lower level' cognitive processes in
Modularity of Mind he also argued that higher level cognitive processes are not modular since they have dissimilar properties.
The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, a reaction to
Steven PinkerSteven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science...
's
How the Mind WorksHow the Mind Works is a book by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, published in 1997. The book attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms...
, is devoted to this subject.
Fodor (1983) states that modular systems must - at least to "some interesting extent" - fulfill certain properties:
- Domain specificity, modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs – they are specialised
- Informational encapsulation, modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate
- Obligatory firing, modules process in a mandatory manner
- Fast speed, probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input)
- Shallow outputs, the output of modules is very simple
- Limited accessibility
- Characteristic ontogeny
Ontogeny describes the origin and the development of an organism from the fertilized egg to its mature form...
, there is a regularity of development
- Fixed neural architecture.
Pylyshyn (1999) has argued that while these properties tend to occur with modules, one stands out as being the real signature of a module; that is the encapsulation of the processes inside the module from both cognitive influence and from cognitive access. This is referred to as the "cognitive impenetrability" of the module.
Evolutionary psychology
Other perspectives on modularity come from
evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
, particularly from the work of
Leda CosmidesLeda Cosmides, is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology....
and
John ToobyJohn Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology....
. This perspective suggests that modules are units of mental processing that evolved in response to selection pressures. On this view, much modern human psychological activity is rooted in adaptations that occurred earlier in
human evolutionHuman evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the origin and evolution of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominids, great apes and placental mammals...
, when
natural selectionNatural selection is the process by which heritable traits that make it more likely for an organism to survive and successfully reproduce become more common in a population over successive generations...
was forming the modern human species.
Arguments against modularity
In contrast to modular mental structure, some theories posit
domain-general processing, in which mental activity is distributed across the brain and cannot be decomposed, even abstractly, into independent units. A staunch defender of this view is William Uttal, who argues in
The New Phrenology (2003) that there are serious philosophical, theoretical, and methodological problems with the entire enterprise of trying to localize cognitive processes in the
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
. Part of this argument is that a successful
taxonomyTaxonomy is the practice and science of classification. The word finds its roots in the Greek , taxis and , nomos...
of mental processes has yet to be developed.
See also
- Modularity
Modularity is a general systems concept, typically defined as a continuum describing the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined. It refers to both the tightness of coupling between components, and the degree to which the “rules” of the system architecture enable the...
- Language module
Language module refers to a hypothesized structure in the human brain or cognitive system that some psycholinguists claim contains innate capacities for language...
- Visual modularity
In cognitive neuroscience, visual modularity is an organizational concept concerning how vision works. The way in which the primate visual system operates is currently under intense scientific scrutiny...
- Society of Mind
The Society of Mind is a book and theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky.- Minsky's model:In a step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built layer by layer from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are...
which proposes the mind is made up of agents
- Jerry Fodor on mental architecture
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.-Fodor and Chomsky:...
For contrasting views:
- Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the changing of neurons, the organization of their networks, and their function via new experiences. This idea was first proposed in 1892 by Santiago Ramón y Cajal the proposer of the neuron doctrine though the idea was largely neglected for the next fifty years...
Further reading
- Barrett, H. C., and Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review
Psychological Review is a scientific journal that publishes articles on psychological theory. It was founded by Princeton psychologist James Mark Baldwin and Columbia psychologist James McKeen Cattell in 1894 as a publication vehicle for psychologists not connected with the Clark laboratory of G....
, 113, 628-647. Full text
- Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1984). Computation and cognition: Toward a foundation for cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Also available through CogNet).
- Animal Minds : Beyond Cognition to Consciousness Donald R. Griffin, University of Chicago Press, 2001 (ISBN 0226308650)