Modularity

One of the liveliest debates within cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology concerns the extent to which, and in which sense, the mind is modular. Several different notions of module have been developed over the years, and clarifying the weaker and stronger notions of module is an important, substantial philosophical project. A range of arguments have been conceived to show that modular processes subserve all cognitive competences, some of them, or none of them, and these need to be scrutinized with care. Of particular importance are, first, Fodor’s view that modules subserve only input systems (roughly, our senses) and linguistic systems, while nonmodular, domain-general processes subserve thinking and deciding; and, second, evolutionary psychologists’ massive modularity hypothesis, according to which cognition is modular through and through