Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Nativism is the view that our minds come pre-equipped with significant amounts of information relating to specific problem domains: domains for low-level processes such as vision, as well as for more central aspects of cognition like reasoning and decisionmaking.Among nativists, however, there is much debate over the actual architecture of the mind; over the nature of the mental structures involved in cognition.My aim here is to give a defence of the Massive Modularity (=MM) hypothesis: the view that the mind is largely composed of discrete, encapsulated, informationally isolated computational structures (modules) -each of them dedicated to dealing with a particular problem domain.MM is but one of a family of nativist views collectively referred to as the Computational Theory of Mind.Within this broader camp, MM contrasts with Psychological Rationalism: a view which holds that the mental structures involved in central cognition take the form of representational items (which are not encapsulated) corresponding to such things as beliefs, theories, logical truths, and the like -all of which are available as inputs to a domaingeneral computational processor.As far as cognitive architectures go, both models of cognition represent good designs, or so I will argue.There are no 'knock-down' arguments that can be made against either view.It is not the case that the computations involved in solving adaptive problems are intractable for a domain-general mind.It is not the case that a massively modular mind is, a priori, better * I am indebted to Professor Murray Clarke for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Nativist Models of the Mind, GNOSIS 9 (3):1-22 (2008)M. E. Cuffaro suited for solving these problems.It is not the case that nothing but a massively modular mind could conceivably have been selected for by natural selection.Likewise, it is not the case that a massively modular architecture is inherently self-defeating.But just as a boxer can win a match without scoring a knockout punch, one can declare a winner in the nativist debate without a 'knock-down' argument.I will argue that, although none of the above points of contention show absolutely that MM must be the winner, they all point to MM as a better explanation for how our minds deal with the adaptive problems that we face every day.Before I begin I will make one final note: I will not attempt to address Fodor's locality objection to the Computational Theory of Mind.To address Fodor's objection satisfactorily in addition to what I will deal with here would require far more pages than I have available.More importantly, although I will not argue this here, I believe that Fodor's argument applies equally to both Psychological Rationalism and to MM.While both views propose different solutions to the abduction problem, it is beyond the scope of this paper to address them. 1 Psychological RationalismPsychological Rationalism is a nativist conception of cognition that traces its roots back to Plato.Something like it was defended by Descartes and most of the early modern philosophers of the rationalist tradition.With the rise of Hume and the empiricist tradition, however, Rationalism in psychology fell into decline.It was not until the second half of the twentieth century and Chomsky's work on language that the paradigm began to be taken seriously again.Chomsky used poverty of the stimulus arguments to show that some aspects of human grammar are not learnable through experience, i.e., that there are in-
Author: Cuffaro, Michael
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2105680748