JERRY FODOR MODULARITY OF MIND PDF

Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind is a beginning [It] is the first major monograph in this century to explore some variations on faculty psychology [and] is the best. Where Fodor (, ) draws the line of modularity at the Perceptual plasticity and theoretical neutrality: A reply to Jerry Fodor. John C. Marshall, The Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, – Alvin Liberman, Yale University, President, Haskins Laboratories ” Jerry Fodor’s “Modularity of Mind “is a.

This books has loads of interesting psychological studies and is useful for philosophy of mind. While discussing Neo-Cartesianism, Fodor draws the distinction between innate faculties: Scientific study have been, and will be, limited to modular structures.

A cognitive system is informationally encapsulated to the extent that in the course of processing a foddor set of inputs it cannot access information stored elsewhere; all it has to go on is the information contained in those inputs plus whatever information might be stored within the jerrg itself, for example, in a proprietary database.

Perceptual restoration of missing speech sounds. But systems with this feature might still fail the test, due to information seepage of a different i. It has also been used demarcate the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and to defend a notably austere version of semantic minimalism Borg, Merlin Donald argues that over evolutionary time the mind has gained adaptive advantage from being a general problem solver.

In his views modules can be found in peripheral processing such as low-level visual processing but not in central processing.

Modularity of Mind

Well, what aren’t natural kinds? Thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Modularity Of Mind is one of those rare books that combine a formidable vocabulary with a concise communicative style. One person found this helpful. I This isn’t a mediocre fo as the rating stars might suggest, it’s actually a very superb, original, and influential book by Jerry A. Scientific study have been, and I would put this in the psychology section of a library before I would put it in the philosophy section. Fodor states that modular systems must—at least to “some interesting extent”—fulfill certain properties:.

Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Input Systems as Modules.

modularitt There must be a region where the pathways from input systems terminate. Open Preview See a Problem? How to think about the modularity of mind-reading. This is the deep trouble underlying the framing problem of artificial intelligence.

Nonetheless I would suggest this for people interested in more philosophy of mind books to read.

The mistake, however, would be to expand this to the “massive modularity hypothesis,” because that would be an over-simplification, in my view. An enthusiast of Quinean naturalized epistemology, Fodor is also sympathetic to Quinean holism: In contrast, cognitivists saw lower level processes as continuous with higher level processes, being inferential and cognitively penetrable modulaity by other cognitive domains, such as beliefs.

These hypotheses are then passed on to central systems for the purpose of belief fixation, and those systems in turn pass their outputs to systems responsible for the production of behavior.

Mandatoriness, speed, and superficiality. But such a mechanism would be domain general rather than domain specific, and hence, non-modular. In other words, the evolvability of the system as a moudlarity requires the independent evolvability of its parts. A second point, related to the first, is that defenders of massive modularity have chiefly been concerned to defend the modularity of central cognition, taking for granted that the mind is modular at the level of input systems.

The Modularity of Mind by Jerry A. Fodor

The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions. Fodor writes with clarity and style, and presents complex experiments and ideas very modularit. However, this book is surprisingly relevant to the 21st century, where the study of neuroscience is advancing towards an integrative approach.

Cognitive penetrability of perception.

Each of these disorders have been found in otherwise cognitively normal individuals, suggesting that the lost capacities are subserved by functionally dissociable mechanisms. Some writers have interpreted shallowness to require non-conceptual character e.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The type of mindreading impairments characteristic of Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism, for example, co-occur with sensory processing and executive function deficits Frith, A Functional Taxonomy of Cognitive Mechanisms. Suffice to say that the language parser in the mind is a module – an informationally encapsulated, domain specific analyzer of sense data.

An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 1: For example, it has been suggested that the capacity to think about social exchanges is subserved by a domain-specific, functionally dissociable, and innate mechanism Stone et al.

Philosophical Studies All in all, then, compelling general arguments for massive modularity are hard to come by. The author devotes much space to the question of the relative extent of processing of input within the input system versus within the central processor.