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Faculties and Modularity
Abstract
While theorizing about mental faculties had been in decline throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, cognitivism and classical science brought back questions about the architecture of mind. Within this framework, Jerry Fodor developed a functionalist approach to what he called the "modularity of the mind." While he believes that cognitive science can only explain the lower faculties of the mind, evolutionary psychology seizes on the notion of modularity and transforms it into the radical claim that the mind is modular all the way up. By comparison, recent approaches that take cognition to be embodied and situated have renewed the radical criticism of faculties or modules that was dominant from the nineteenth century onward. The concept of module is a naturalized successor of the traditional concept of faculty, as this chapter shows, and the debate about modules is centrally a debate about the possibility of naturalizing the mind.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Burkart et al.'s impressive synthesis will serve as a valuable resource for intelligence research. Despite its strengths, the target article falls short of offering compelling explanations for the evolution of intelligence. Here, we outline its shortcomings, illustrate how these can lead to misguided conclusions about the evolution of intelligence, and suggest ways to address the article's key questions.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Here, we specifically discuss why and to what extent we agree with Burkart et al. about the coexistence of general intelligence and modular cognitive adaptations, and why we believe that the distinction between primary and secondary modules they propose is indeed essential.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
We welcome the cross-disciplinary approach taken by Burkart et al. to probe the evolution of intelligence. We note several concerns: the uses of g and G , rank-ordering species on cognitive ability, and the meaning of general intelligence. This subject demands insights from several fields, and we look forward to cross-disciplinary collaborations.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Are the mechanisms underlying variations in the performance of animals on cognitive test batteries analogous to those of humans? Differences might result from procedural inconsistencies in test battery design, but also from differences in how animals and humans solve cognitive problems. We suggest differentiating associative-based ( learning ) from rule-based ( knowing ) tasks to further our understanding of cognitive evolution across species.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
The goal of our target article was to lay out current evidence relevant to the question of whether general intelligence can be found in nonhuman animals in order to better understand its evolution in humans. The topic is a controversial one, as evident from the broad range of partly incompatible comments it has elicited. The main goal of our response is to translate these issues into testable empirical predictions, which together can provide the basis for a broad research agenda.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Burkart et al. present a paradox – general factors of intelligence exist among individual differences ( g ) in performance in several species, and also at the aggregate level ( G ); however, there is ambiguous evidence for the existence of g when analyzing data using a mixed approach, that is, when comparing individuals of different species using the same cognitive ability battery. Here, we present an empirical solution to this paradox.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
The authors evaluate evidence for general intelligence ( g ) in nonhumans but lean heavily toward mammalian data. They mention, but do not discuss in detail, evidence for g in nonmammalian species, for which substantive material exists. I refer to a number of avian studies, particularly in corvids and parrots, which would add breadth to the material presented in the target article.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Across taxonomic subfamilies, variations in intelligence ( G ) are sometimes related to brain size. However, within species, brain size plays a smaller role in explaining variations in general intelligence ( g ), and the cause-and-effect relationship may be opposite to what appears intuitive. Instead, individual differences in intelligence may reflect variations in domain-general processes that are only superficially related to brain size.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
Conceptualizing intelligence in its biological context, as the expression of manifold adaptations, compels a rethinking of measuring this characteristic in humans, relying also on animal studies of analogous skills. Mental manipulation , as an extension of object manipulation, provides a continuous, biologically based concept for studying G as it pertains to individual differences in humans and other species.
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domaingeneral cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but also for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
... Indeed, a small set of dedicated modules, without any domain-general cognitive abilities, to which additional modules can be added as needed, may be the ancestral state of vertebrate cognition. This perspective is so convincing that it has led to accounts of massive modularity, not only for animal cognition, but for human cognition as well (reviews: Barrett 2015;Frankenhuis & Ploeger 2007;Hufendiek & Wild 2015). ...
The presence of general intelligence poses a major evolutionary puzzle, which has led to increased interest in its presence in nonhuman animals. The aim of this review is to critically evaluate this puzzle, and to explore the implications for current theories about the evolution of cognition. We first review domain-general and domain-specific accounts of human cognition in order to situate attempts to identify general intelligence in nonhuman animals. Recent studies are consistent with the presence of general intelligence in mammals (rodents and primates). However, the interpretation of a psychometric g-factor as general intelligence needs to be validated, in particular in primates, and we propose a range of such tests. We then evaluate the implications of general intelligence in nonhuman animals for current theories about its evolution and find support for the cultural intelligence approach, which stresses the critical importance of social inputs during the ontogenetic construction of survival-relevant skills. The presence of general intelligence in nonhumans implies that modular abilities can arise in two ways, primarily through automatic development with fixed content and secondarily through learning and automatization with more variable content. The currently best-supported model, for humans and nonhuman vertebrates alike, thus construes the mind as a mix of skills based on primary and secondary modules. The relative importance of these two components is expected to vary widely among species, and we formulate tests to quantify their strength.
Representatives of ethical neo-Aristotelian naturalism (henceforth: Aristotelian naturalism) consider themselves naturalists. The term “naturalism” is notoriously vague, however. We can try to compensate for this vagueness by remarking that Aristotelian naturalism is in favour of biological naturalism rather than physical naturalism. Relying on physics as a reference science to demonstrate that certain human capacities (such as language, thought or morals) are natural and scientifically respectable is quite different from relying on biology. The nature of certain activities becomes fully apparent only if we consider humans as biological beings and not as physical objects. This is one of the fundamental aims of Aristotelian naturalism, and it suggests that Aristotelian naturalism should also be, somehow, biological.
Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering.
Given the dramatic variety of the relevant phenomena, embodied memory is appropriately of interest in both basic and applied studies of many distinctive topics – dance and sport, trauma and therapy, emotion and expertise, to mention just a few. It is a topic which rightly spans not only the range of the cognitive sciences, but also social science and the humanities. Two-way benefits could flow between theory and practice: academic discussions of 'embodied cognition', which can sometimes be curiously abstract or anecdotal, could fruitfully engage with and in turn contribute to rich bodies of lore and expertise among practitioners of bodily skills and well-developed research traditions in fields like sports science, music psychology, and dance cognition.
Human beings are unusual in the variety of ways we relate to our history. Past events can be explicitly and consciously recollected, or can have more implicit influences on body, mind, and action. As well as the many respects in which the cumulative effects of the past drive our biology and our behaviour, we also have the peculiar capacity to think about our histories. We can remember cooking a particular dish on a specific occasion for just that group of friends, though of course such memories are fallible. I remember cooking that meal because I did so, and this past experience is itself also the object of my thought. But we can also remember how to cook, as we show simply by doing so. In the latter case, accumulated experiences are actively embodied in actions. I need not explicitly recollect any specific past events, or even recognize that I am remembering, unless my smooth coping is disrupted. As Edward Casey puts it, such memory is intrinsic to the body: 'because it re-enacts the past, it need not represent it' (1987: 147, 178).
The Architecture of Mind is an ambitious and informative work, surveying an impressive range of empirical literature and arguing that the mind is massively modular. However, it suffers from two major theoretical flaws. First, Carruthers’ concept of a module is weak, so much so that it robs his thesis of massive modularity of any real substance. Second, his conception of how the mind’s modules evolved ignores the role of niche construction and cultural evolution to its detriment.
In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on the implications of this claim for the study of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. In the course of her discussion, Colombetti focuses on long-debated issues in affective science, including the notion of basic emotions, the nature of appraisal and its relationship to bodily arousal, the place of bodily feelings in emotion experience, the neurophysiological study of emotion experience, and the bodily nature of our encounters with others. Drawing on enactivist tools such as dynamical systems theory, the notion of the lived body, neurophenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of empathy, Colombetti advances a novel approach to these traditional issues that does justice to their complexity. Doing so, she also expands the enactive approach into a further domain of inquiry, one that has more generally been neglected by the embodied-embedded approach in the philosophy of cognitive science. © 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain- bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
controversies have focused on the thesis that perceptual and linguistic decoding processes are modular, much more than on the alleged nonmodularity of thought / defend the view that thought processes might be modular too / articulate a modular view of human thought with the naturalistic view of human culture that [the author has] been developing under the label "epidemiology of representations" / show how, contrary to the received view, organisms endowed with truly modular minds might engender truly diverse cultures (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The Modularity of Mind proposes an alternative to the “New Look” or “interaetionist” view of cognitive architecture that has dominated several decades of cognitive science. Whereas interactionism stresses the continuity of perceptual and cognitive processes, modularity theory argues for their distinctness. It is argued, in particular, that the apparent plausibility of New Look theorizing derives from the failure to distinguish between the (correct) claim that perceptual processes are inferential and the (dubious) claim that they are unencapsidated, that is, that they are arbitrarily sensitive to the organism's beliefs and desires. In fact, according to modularity theory, perceptual processes are computationally isolated from much of the background knowledge to which cognitive processes have access. The postulation of autonomous, domain-specific psychological mechanisms underlying perceptual integration connects modularity theory with the tradition of faculty psychology, in particular, with the work of Franz Joseph Call. Some of these historical affinities, and some of the relations between faculty psychology and Cartesianism, are discussed in the book.
Currently, there is widespread skepticism that higher cognitive processes, given their apparent flexibility and globality, could be carried out by specialized computational devices, or modules. This skepticism is largely due to Fodor's influential definition of modularity. From the rather flexible catalogue of possible modular features that Fodor originally proposed has emerged a widely held notion of modules as rigid, informationally encapsulated devices that accept highly local inputs and whose operations are insensitive to context. It is a mistake, however, to equate such features with computational devices in general and therefore to assume, as Fodor does, that higher cognitive processes must be non-computational. Of the many possible non-Fodorean architectures, one is explored here that offers possible solutions to computational problems faced by conventional modular systems: an ‘enzymatic’ architecture. Enzymes are computational devices that use lock-and-key template matching to identify relevant information (substrates), which is then operated upon and returned to a common pool for possible processing by other devices. Highly specialized enzymes can operate together in a common pool of information that is not pre-sorted by information type. Moreover, enzymes can use molecular ‘tags’ to regulate the operations of other devices and to change how particular substrates are construed and operated upon, allowing for highly interactive, context-specific processing. This model shows how specialized, modular processing can occur in an open system, and suggests that skepticism about modularity may largely be due to failure to consider alternatives to the standard model.
Readiness depends on how accessible categories are to the stimulated organism. Accessibility is a function of the likehood of occurrence of previously learned events, and one's need states and habits of daily living. Lack of perceptual readiness can be rectified by relearning the categories, or by constant close inspection of events and objects. Sensory stimuli are "sorted" to appropriate categories by searching for and using cues. 4 mechanisms are proposed: "grouping and integration, access ordering, match-mismatch signal utilization, and gating." Failure of perceptual readiness may occur because of inability to learn appropriate categories or through interference of accessible categories. These ideas may shed light on "perceptual defense." 88 references.
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