How to think about the modularity of mind-reading

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 50, Issue 199, 2000, Pages 145-160

  Currie, Gregory ^a   Sterelny, Kim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007506814     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9213.00176     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. R. Byrne and A. Whiten (eds), Machiavellian Intelligence (Oxford UP, 1988),
2. Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations (Cambridge UP, 1997).
3. J. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind: an Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge: Bradford Books, 1983).
4. R. Jackendoff, Languages of the Mind (MIT Press, 1992), pp. 70, 71.
5. See also J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford UP, 1992), p. 165;
6. D. Sperber, Explaining Culture: a Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 39.
7. See also T. Shallice, From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure (Cambridge UP, 1988), ch. 12, for a different approach to reconsidering Fodor's ban on central modules.
8. Fodor himself has suggested that knowledge of folk psychology is innate, which is a quite different claim from the claim that it is modular: see his Psychosemantics (MIT Press, 1987), p. 132.
9. G. Gigerenzer, 'The Modularity of Social Intelligence', in Byrne and Whiten (eds), Machiavellian Intelligence II, pp. 264-88, at p. 273.
10. We come back to Gigerenzer's view later. 5 But this is a contingent claim. 'Module' and 'input system' are not synonymous, pace A. Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity (MIT Press, 1997), p. 2.
11. See, e.g., L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, 'The Psychological Foundations of Culture', in J.H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (eds), The Adapted Mind, pp. 19-136.
12. G. Segal, 'The Modularity of Theory of Mind', in P. Carruthers and P.K. Smith (eds), Theories of Theories of Mind (Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 141-57.
13. Curiously, at one point (Modularity of Mind p. 73) Fodor appears to argue that encapsulation is infectious downwards. So a process which contributes to an unencapsulated mechanism is thereby itself unencapsulated. But that cannot be right, for otherwise the whole notion of encapsulation would unravel.
14. Such biases appear to be manifested in superior performance on reasoning tasks when they are given a social interpretation. It has been argued that these biases show that social reasoning is modularized: see D. Cummins, 'Evidence for the Innateness of Deontic Reasoning', Mind and Language, II (1996), pp. 160-90;
15. but cf. M. Oakford and N. Chater, 'Deontic Reasoning, Modules and Innateness: a Second Look', Mind and Language, 11 (1996), pp. 191-202. Our conclusion is that such biases show at most that social reasoning is modular at the level of inputs, not that there is a modularized central system for the fixation of social belief.
16. F. Heider and M. Simmel, 'An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior', American Journal of Psychology, 57 (1944), pp. 243-9.
17. Jackendoff cites this example in support of the thesis of a central faculty of social cognition. See Jackendoff, Languages of the Mind p. 74;
18. see also Gigerenzer, 'The Modularity of Social Intelligence' p. 277.
19. See A. Leslie and T. German, 'Knowledge and Ability in "Theory of Mind": One-eyed Overview of Debate', in M. Davies and T. Stone (eds), Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 123-50;
20. S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: an Essay on Autism and the Theory of Mind (MIT Press, 1995).
21. D. Moore, R.P. Hobson and A. Lee, 'Components of Person Perception: an Investigation with Autistic, Non-autistic, Retarded and Typically Developing Children and Adolescents', British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15 (1997), pp. 401-23.
22. Similarly, Sally Rogers and Bruce Pennington argue that 'early social capacities involving imitation, emotion sharing, and theory of mind are primarily and specifically deficient in [infantile autism]', S.J. Rogers and B.F. Pennington, 'A Theoretical Approach to the Deficits in Infantile Autism', Development and Psychopathology, 3 (1991), pp. 137-62.
23. Cognitive scientists are divided on this question. For a recent defence of the view that there is a substantial overlap see S. Kosslyn, W. Thompson and N. Alpert, 'Neural Systems Shared by Visual Imagery and Visual Perception', Neuroimage, 6 (1997), pp. 320-34. Another issue that would have to be confronted here is whether the relevant imagery must always be conscious.