Jerry Fodor - The Functional Architecture of The Mind

The Functional Architecture of The Mind

Following in the path plowed by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this position emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.

Historically, questions about mental architecture have been divided into two contrasting theories about the nature of the faculties. The first can be described as a "horizontal" view because it sees mental processes as interactions between faculties which are not domain specific. For example, a judgment remains a judgment whether it is judgment about a perceptual experience or a judgment about the understanding of language. The second can be described as a "vertical" view because it claims that our mental faculties are domain specific, genetically determined, associated with distinct neurological structures, and so on.

The vertical vision can be traced back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed that mental faculties could be associated 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 been disproved over the course of the last century.

Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became one of the most vocal proponents of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph Modularity of Mind. Two properties of modularity in particular, informational encapsulation and domain specificity, make it possible to tie together questions of functional architecture with those of mental content. The ability to elaborate information independently from the background beliefs of individuals that these two properties allow Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of the notion of mental content. The main idea, in other words, is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, rather than exclusively on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, also on their causal relations with the external world.

Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity have been taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, among many others. But Fodor complains that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically calls "the New Synthesis" have taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insists that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.