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What Computations (Still, Still) Can't Do: Jerry Fodor on Computation and Modularity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert A. Wilson
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Extract

Jerry Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (2000; hereafter Mind) purports to do a number of things. To name three: First, it aims to show what is problematic about recent evolutionary psychology, especially as popularized in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997). Fodor's particular target here is the rose-coloured view of evolutionary psychology as offering a “new synthesis” in integrating computational psychology with evolutionary theory. Second, Fodor's book poses a series of related, in-principle problems for any cognitive theory that revolve around the putative tension between the local nature of computational processing and the global nature of at least some cognitive processing. And third, it reiterates Fodor's earlier argument, in The Modularity of Mind, for the hopelessness of trying to extend the notion of modularity from “input systems” to “central systems.“

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 30: New Essays in The Philosophy of Language and Mind , 2004 , pp. 407 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2004

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