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This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence. Jerry A. Fodor is Professor of Psychology and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at MIT.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This monograph started as some rather light -hearted lecture notes for a graduate course on contemporary cognitive theory that Noam Chomsky and I taught together in the fall of 1980. Scholarship is the process by which butterflies are transmuted into caterpillarsmany drafts have flowed beneath the bridge since then. What has helped to make the process bearable is the generosity with which friends, relatives, colleagues, and occasionalabsolute strangershave chipped in with advice, criticism, encouragement, and useful in formation . I am deeply indebted to at least the following : Ned Block, Susan Block, William Brewer, N oam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Scott Fahlman, Howard Gardner, Henry Gleitman, Lila Gleit man, Michael Hamish, Peter Jusczyk, David Kaplan, Thomas Kuhn, Al vin Liberman, John Limber, John Marshall, William MarslenWilson, Robert Matthews, Ignatius Mattingly , JacquesMehler, Mary Potter, Zenon Pylyshyn , Georges Rey, Brian Smith, and Lorraine Tyler . Special thanks to Jim Hodgson, who ran down references.
FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after
centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought . Since, according to faculty psychologists, the mental causation of behavior typically involves the simultaneous activity of a variety of distinct psychological mechanisms , the best research strategy would seem to be divide
and conquer: first study the intrinsic characteristics of each of the presumed faculties, then study the ways in which they interact. Viewed from the faculty psychologist's perspective, overt, observable
behavior
is an interaction
effect
par
excellence
.
This monograph is about the current status of the faculty psychology program; not so much its evidential status (which I take to be, for the most part , an open question ) as what the program
is and where it does, and doesn't, seem natural to try to apply it . Specifically I I want to do the following things: (1) distinguish the general claim that there are psychological faculties from a particular version of that claim, which I shall call the modularity thesis; (2)
2
Modularity of Mind
enumerate some of the properties that modular cognitive systems are likely to exhibit in virtue of their modularity ; and (3) consider whether it is possible to formulate any plausible hypothesis about which mental processesare likely to be the modular ones. Toward the end of the discussion, I'll also try to do something by way of (4) disentangling the faculty jmodularity issues from what I'll call t