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18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 3. Modularity of Mind

[theory of separate units of the mind/brain]

14 ideas
When we need to do something, we depute an inner servant to remind us of it [Proust]
     Full Idea: Whenever we have something definite to do at a given moment, we depute a certain person inside us who is accustomed to that sort of duty to keep an eye on the clock and warn us of the time. This inner servant reminded me that Albertine was coming soon.
     From: Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past [1922], Cities.2.1)
     A reaction: I think Proust is wrong that we 'depute' this servant. I think it comes as a built-in feature, and the servant could never be abandoned or sacked, no matter how poor the service. Each of us is a team, which includes servants.
Modules have encapsulation, inaccessibility, private concepts, innateness [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The four essential properties of modules are: encapsulation (information doesn't flow, as in the persistence of illusions); inaccessibility (unreportable); domain specificity (they have private concepts); innateness (genetically preprogrammed).
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.11)
     A reaction: If they have no information flow, and are unreportable and private, this makes empirical testing of Fodor's hypothesis a little tricky. He must be on to something, though.
Blindness doesn't destroy spatial concepts [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Blind children are not, in general, linguistically impaired; not even in their talk about space.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13)
     A reaction: This is offered to demonstrate that spatial concepts are innate, even in the blind. But then we would expect anyone who has to move in space to develop spatial concepts from experience.
Obvious modules are language and commonsense explanation [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The best candidates for the status of mental modules are language (the first one, put there by Chomsky), commonsense biology, commonsense physics, commonsense psychology, and aspects of visual form perception.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13)
     A reaction: My favourite higher level module is my Personal Assistant, who keeps nagging me to do sundry things, only some of which I agree to. It is an innate superego, but still a servant of the Self.
Something must take an overview of the modules [Fodor]
     Full Idea: It is not plausible that the mind could be made only of modules; one does sometimes manage to balance one's checkbook, and there can't be an innate, specialized intelligence for doing that.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13)
     A reaction: I agree strongly with this. My own mind strikes me as being highly modular, but as long as I am aware of the output of the modules, I can pass judgement. The judger is more than a 'module'.
Modules analyse stimuli, they don't tell you what to do [Fodor]
     Full Idea: The thinking involved in "figuring out" what to do is a quite different kind of mental process than the stimulus analysis that modules perform.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13)
     A reaction: My PA theory fits this perfectly. My inner assistant keeps providing information about needs, duties etc., but takes no part in my decisions. Psychology must include the Will.
Modules make the world manageable [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Modules function to present the world to thought under descriptions that are germane to the success of behaviour.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.13)
     A reaction: "Descriptions" might be a bold word to use about something so obscure, but this pinpoints the evolutionary nature of modularity theory, to which I subscribe.
Babies talk in consistent patterns [Fodor]
     Full Idea: "Who Mummy love?" is recognizably baby talk; but "love Mummy who?" is not.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.14)
     A reaction: Not convincing. If she is embracing Daddy, and asking baby, she might get the answer "Daddy", after a bit of coaxing. Who knows what babies up the Amazon respond to?
Modules have in-built specialist information [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Modules contain lots of specialized information about the problem domains that they compute in.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17)
     A reaction: At this point we must be cautious about modularity. I doubt whether 'information' is the right word. I think 'specialized procedures' might make more sense.
Rationality rises above modules [Fodor]
     Full Idea: Probably, modular computation doesn't explain how minds are rational; it's just a sort of precursor. You work through it to get a view of how horribly hard our rationality is to understand.
     From: Jerry A. Fodor (In a Critical Condition [2000], Ch.17)
     A reaction: The choice is between a Self which weighs and judges the inputs, or merely decisions that automatically result from the balance of inputs. The latter seems unlikely. Vetoes are essential.
Mental modules are specialised, automatic, and isolated [Fodor, by Okasha]
     Full Idea: Fodor argues that mental modules have three important featuresL 1) they are domain-specific, 2) their operation is mandatory, 3) they are informationally encapsulated.
     From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (The Modularity of Mind [1983]) by Samir Okasha - Philosophy of Science: Very Short Intro (2nd ed) 6
     A reaction: Mandatory is interesting. When I hear an English sentence I can't decide not to process it. Modules cannot be too isolated or they couldn't participate in the team. Each one needs a comms manager.
Children speak 90% good grammar [Rey]
     Full Idea: Ninety percent of most young children's utterances are grammatical.
     From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.2.4)
     A reaction: This is good evidence for some sort of innate element in the grammar of language. But the accurate grammar is not in a particular language. Good communication must be the driving force in all this.
Good grammar can't come simply from stimuli [Rey]
     Full Idea: Grammatical sensitivity is in no way a physical property of the stimulus, and we can't imagine how to build a device which would produce grammatical structures in response to the environment.
     From: Georges Rey (Contemporary Philosophy of Mind [1997], 4.3)
     A reaction: You could try to program it with a set of (say) Aristotelian categories, and mechanisms to sort the environment accordingly. It then has to query its database, in response to practical needs. A doddle.
Brain complexity balances segregation and integration, like a good team of specialists [Edelman/Tononi]
     Full Idea: A theoretical analysis of complexity suggests that neuronal complexity strikes an optimum balance between segregation and integration, which fits the view of the brain as a collection of specialists who talk to each other a lot.
     From: G Edelman / G Tononi (Consciousness: matter becomes imagination [2000], Ch.11)
     A reaction: This is a theoretical point, but comes from a leading neuroscientist, and seems to endorse Fodor's modularity proposal. For a philosopher, one of the issues here is how to reconcile the segregation with the Cartesian unity and personal identity of a mind.