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Topic: Modularity of mind

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	Modularity of mind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Modularity of mind is the notion that a mind may be composed of modules, at least in part.
		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.
		Fodor, Jerry A. Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Modularity_of_Mind (891 words)

	In defense of massive modularity
		Fodor’s main argument against massive modularity is that modules, given their processing and informational restrictions, could not possibly perform the kind of general reasoning tasks that human minds perform all the time, drawing freely, or so it seems, on all the information available.
		Adopt a strong modularist view of the mind, assume that all the modules that have access to some possible input are ready to produce the corresponding output, but assume also that each such process takes resources, and that there are not enough resources for all processes to take place.
		However, the crucial argument against computational theory and modularity is that it cannot be reconciled with the obvious abductive capabilities of the human mind, and I hope to have shown that Fodor’s case here is not all that airtight.
	www.dan.sperber.com /modularity.htm (3465 words)

	Modularity (programming) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Modularity is a concept that has applications in the contexts of computer science, particularly programming, as well as cognitive science in investigating the structure of mind.
		Modularity is the property of computer programs that measures the extent to which they have been composed out of separate parts called modules.
		Programs that have many direct interrelationships between any two random parts of the program code are less modular than programs where those relationships occur mainly at well-defined interfaces between modules.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Modularity_(programming) (173 words)

	Moderately massive modularity
		Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
		Modules are held to be mandatory in their operation, swift in their processing, isolated from and inaccessible to the rest of cognition, associated with particular neural structures, liable to specific and characteristic patterns of breakdown, and to develop according to a paced and distinctively-arranged sequence of growth.
		The focus of their argument is actually the alleged modularity of mind-reading or ‘theory of mind’; but it is plain that their conclusion is intended to generalize – if mind-reading can be shown to be a-modular, then it is very doubtful whether any central modules exist.
	www.philosophy.umd.edu /Faculty/pcarruthers/Moderate-modularity.htm (8448 words)

	Annette Karmiloff-Smith: Modularity of Mind
		But it was the publication of Fodor's Modularity of Mind (1983) which set the stage for recent modularity theorizing and which provided a precise set of criteria about what constitutes a module.
		There are for instance developmental disorders in which theory of mind is impaired in otherwise high functioning people with AUTISM (Frith 1989), or face processing is spared together with seriously impaired visuo-spatial cognition as in the case of people with Williams syndrome (Bellugi, Wang and Jernigan 1994).
		A different way to conceive of modularity might therefore be to adopt a truly developmental perspective and acknowledge that the structure of minds could emerge from dynamically developing brains, whether normal or abnormal, in interaction with the environment.
	home.coqui.net /gtirado/Karmiloff.htm (1732 words)

	Mind, philosophy of : Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online
		In philosophy of mind, these developments led to Functionalism, according to which mental states are to be characterized in terms of relations they bear among themselves and to inputs and outputs, for example, mediating perception and action in the way that belief and desire characteristically seem to do.
		These differences might also cause the minds to be organized in different ways at different levels, an idea that has encouraged the co-existence of the many different disciplines of cognitive science, each studying the mind at often different levels of explanation.
		In the philosophies of mind and psychology, the issue is not primarily the meanings of expressions in natural language, but of how a state of the mind or brain can have meaning or content: what is it to believe, for example, that snow is white or hope that you will win.
	www.rep.routledge.com /article/V038#V038P2.10 (2798 words)

	20th WCP: Why Granny Should Have Read French Philosophers: The Phenomenology of Fodor or the Modularity of Merleau-Ponty
		Therefore, the aforementioned noisy stimuli cases can be consistent with Fodor’s modularity theory provided that the central system is sometimes performing an unconscious selection or filtering process that chooses representations in light of their appropriateness.
		While the underlying cortical structures of the brain display a certain degree of independence (Shallice, 1988) support their possible modularity and independence, there is compelling evidence that these structures have recurrent connections (Sejnowski and Churchland, 1989).
		Fodor, J. Precise of the Modularity of Mind.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Mind/MindWolf.htm (2580 words)

	The Modularity Home Page (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		General definition of modularity and nonmodularity in neural networks: “modular systems can be defined as systems made up of structurally and/or functionally distinct parts.
		While non-modular systems are internally homogeneous, modular systems are segmented into modules, i.e., portions of a system having a structure and/or function different from the structure or function of other portions of the system.
		A case study of the evolution of modularity: towards a bridge between evolutionary biology, artificial life, neuro- and cognitive science.
	gral.ip.rm.cnr.it /rcalabretta/modularity.html (1511 words)

	Evolution and the Human Mind - Cambridge University Press
		The essays focus especially on issues to do with modularity of mind, the evolution and significance of natural language, and the evolution of our capacity for meta-cognition (thought about thought), together with its implications for consciousness.
		Evolution of the modern mind and the origins of culture: religious concepts as a limiting case Pascal Boyer; 6.
		Symmetry and the evolution of the modular linguistic mind Thomas Wynn; 7.
	www.cambridge.org /catalogue/print.asp?isbn=0521783313&print=y (410 words)

	bluejoh:: the dungeon has... - Cognitive Linguistics - Modularity Hypothesis (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Fodor distinguished between faculties of the mind that were horizontal (for example attention, reasoning, representation) which he deemed non-modular central processors, and vertical faculties (for example language and perception), which are input/output systems and modular.
		Fodor felt that the modularity hypothesis was more appealing than the view of the mind as a general-purpose problem-solver because it could be seen to better simulate what happens to the brain when it suffers from damage, either through genetic defect or by lesions to the brain.
		Language and perception can be seen to be universal to the human mind, for example all normally developing children learn to speak at least one language (there are even examples of deaf children ‘creating’ their own sign-language in the absence of a parental imposed one).
	www.bluejoh.com /dungeon/archives/000402.php (2283 words)

	The Modularity of Dynamic Systems
		Fodor remains the most articulate preacher of the gospel of high church computationalism, and when his concept of modularity goes beyond the tautologous claim that minds are analyzable, it almost always brings in strong commitments to the claim that minds are really computers.
		So perhaps{2} he might be made more sympathetic by the fact that the concepts I have in mind are not strictly new, although their application to cognitive science is a fairly recent development.
		For although dynamic systems are modular in the loose sense that they are comprehensible, they don't fit easily into many of the constraints that Fodor superimposes on the concept of module.
	users.california.com /~mcmf/mod.html (7789 words)

	Philosophy of Mind Bibliography, Part 5: Philosophy of Psychology
		Argues that commonsense and scientific psychology are quite distinct in their aims, scope, framework, and nature, but have been confused by philosophy.
		Zahavi, D. The embodied self-awareness of the infant: A challenge to the theory-theory of mind.
		Freeman, N. Theories of mind in collision: Plausibility and authority.
	consc.net /biblio/5.html (2890 words)

	Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading
		The selection pressures which lead to the emergence of cognitive systems over evolutionary time must also tend to make these systems more efficient, and in particular to attune them, via dedicated mechanisms, to the specific problems and opportunities it is their function to handle.
		It is hard to believe that two-year-old children, who fail for instance on regular first-order false-belief tasks, can recognise and understand the peculiar multi-level representations involved in communication, using nothing more than a general ability to attribute intentions to agents in order to explain their behaviour.
		In the absence of other evidence, the very fact that an interpretation is the first to come to mind lends it an initial degree of plausibility.
	www.dan.sperber.com /pragmatics-modularity-and-mindreading.htm (7955 words)

	Jerry Fodor - Psychology Central (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		His quickness of mind, inventiveness, and sharp wit are not to be tangled with before your first cup of coffee in the morning.
		However, Fodor, revived the idea of the modularity of mind, without the notion of precise physical localizability of the mental faculties, in the 1980s and became one of the most articulate proponents for it with the 1983 publication of his monograph Modularity of Mind.
		In the modern panorama of philosophy of mind, in which the functionalist view tends to prevail, the majority view seems to be that the first of these two assertions is false, but that the second is true.
	www.psychcentral.com /psypsych/Jerry_Fodor (4722 words)

	hart (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Scholars in these fields overwhelmingly subscribe to what is known as the “modularity” theory, the idea that cognitive functions are governed by relatively independent modules or processors that occupy discrete places in the brain.
		Modularity offers cognitive scientists a metaphor for mind/brain operations that is compatible with their parallel commitment to the metaphor of mind as computer.
		Donald’s vision offers an explanatory model that far surpasses those models offered by scientists committed to modular- or computer-based images of mind; and interestingly, he achieves it by de-emphasizing the role of language that linguists habitually privilege in their assumptions about language autonomy.
	web.nwe.ufl.edu /sls/abstracts/hart.html (350 words)

	BEYOND MODULARITY: A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE...
		Fodor s 1983 book The Modularity of Mind made a significant impact on developmental theorizing by suggesting how the nativist thesis and the domain-specificity of cognition are relevant to constraints on the architecture of the human mind/brain.
		By contrast, if the modularization thesis is correct, activation levels should initially be relatively distributed across the brain, and only with time (and this could be a short or relatively long time during infancy, depending on the domain) would specific circuits be activated in response to domain- specific inputs.
		Yet throughout Beyond Modularity examples are explored of how human children spontaneously seek to understand their own cognition, and that this leads to the sort of representational manipulability that eventually allows them to become folk linguists, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, and notators.
	www.bbsonline.org /documents/a/00/00/05/33/bbs00000533-00/bbs.karmsmith.html (13825 words)

	[No title]
		I argue that "modularity" of the brain may be organised in terms of time-scales as well as space.
		Nevertheless, the neuropsychological evidence for modularity, combined with convincing connectionist models such as DISCERN and that of Plaut & Shallice (1993), suggests that the cortex is performing a number of types of computations which brain damage can effect differentially.
		Great care is therefore required in drawing inferences from neuropsychology to support modular connectionist models of cognition or using these models to explain the basis of neuropatholgies.
	www.infomotions.com /serials/psycoloquy/psycol-941227-kentridge-modularity.txt (1927 words)

	LINGUIST List 9.383: NLP and Syntax (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Menzel recites the increasingly common argument that modularity of mind can't be right because recent brain studies show that various cognitive functions are not localized to specific areas of the brain.
		This line of argument is based on a misinterpretation of the modularity hypothesis, and while it is certainly possible that the modularity hypothesis will turn out to be wrong, it is important to be clear about why current brain studies don't argue against modularity.
		In short, the core assumption behind modularity of mind is that certain abstract representations (as well as the psychological mechanisms for manipulating those representations) are essentially function specific.
	www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de /linguist/issues/9/9-383.html (4677 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		My current research is focused on two large clusters of issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
		MIND READING: The first of these is centered around the phenomenon of "mind reading" -- the process by which we come to know about the mental states of other people.
		EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: The other cluster of issues are centered around evolutionary psychology, the view that the mind consists primarity of a cluster of mental "organs" or "modules" that were shaped by natural selection to solve specific specific adaptive problems.
	www.philosophy.rutgers.edu /FACSTAFF/BIOS/stich.html (2033 words)

	Kentridge, Robert William (1994) Modularity of Mind, Cerebral Localisation and Connectionist Neuropsychology, ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Although Miikkulainen's DISCERN (1993) is a model of cognition and not the brain, its completely connectionist construction and similarities between the effects of damage on its behaviour and the neuropsychology of dyslexia may tempt us to treat it as a brain model.
		The brain is obviously fundamentally parallel, and neuropsychological and neuroanatomical evidence suggest that both its function and its organisation are modular (e.g., Fellerman and Van Essen, 1991; Ellis and Young, 1988).
		Nevertheless, the neuropsychological evidence for modularity, combined with convincing connectionist models such as DISCERN and that of Plaut and Shallice (1993), suggests that the cortex is performing a number of types of computations which brain damage can effect differentially.
	psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk /archive/00000446 (2252 words)

	The Trigger Problem
		It bears emphasis, though, that synchronic modularity does not amount to the absurd idea that children are born with all capacities intact and on-line.
		Thus, if the mind is massively modular, and modules are computational devices, then all computations would be similarly restricted, i.e., all computations would be definable over a fixed range of syntactic properties - those that realise the encapsulated sets of concepts particular to modules.
		The problem arises where we have distinctions to which our minds are attuned, such as language or not language (Fodor’s own example), that are not marked, at least not apparently so, by sensory features, i.e., those which may be psychophysically detected by a transducer and fed to a peripheral module.
	www.uea.ac.uk /~j108/modularity.htm (9204 words)

	Evolutionary Psychology
		The structures of mind that develop over time are taken to be arbitrary and accidental; there is no 'human nature' apart from what develops as a specific historical product....
		Now, taking this metaphor of cognitive abilities as organs, adding to it the notion that these abilities might be modular in their nature, realising that mosaic evolution is the norm.
		The first is generally known as 'Theory of Mind' research, and this pursues questions in both developmental and comparative psychology as to what children and other animals know about other minds.
	evolution.massey.ac.nz /lecture6/lect600.htm (4487 words)

	fragments of consciousness: Books in the philosophy of mind
		The list is meant to be a philosophy of mind list rather than a cogsci or even a philosophy of cogsci list (if the latter, there would be a strong case for books like The Modularity of Mind and Neurophilosophy, at least on grounds of sheer influence).
		Plus, the topic of the organization of the mind and the nature of mental processes is a topic that has a long history in philosophy.
		Of course a huge amount of important philosophy of mind is done via papers, and a lot is done via books that one wouldn't immediately classify as books in the philosophy of mind.
	fragments.consc.net /djc/2005/01/books_in_the_ph.html (4041 words)

	Amazon.com: The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: Books: Jerry Fodor (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Rather, he rejects their extravagant claims to have successfully explained "The Way the Mind Works," to quote the title of a recent book by Steve Pinker, who is one of the leading evangelists for cognitive psychology and evolutionary psych.
		This critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor's own 1983 watershed book "The Modularity of Mind".
		Fodor argues that while "computational" models of the mind (roughly, theories that the mind is just a computer) may be able to explain how the mind's modules work, they fail to explain how the mind's central processor works.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262062127?v=glance (2785 words)

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