The Debate Over the Modularity of Cognitive Structure

This essay investigates the problem about the modularity of central cognitive architecture, focusing on how to grasp the debate between Fodorian minimal modularism and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis (MMH) proposed by evolutionary psychologists. Both conceive of the idea of "modularity" in different ways. While minimal modularism takes "informational encapsulation" to be essential to modules, the MMH does not. Furthermore, their idea of "domain specificity" does not even agree. This essay does not take the debate to be mere verbal issue. Instead, this essay argues that from the minimal modularist point of view, due to the holistic and isotropic features essential to central mechanisms, such mechanisms are informationally unencapsulated and hence are not modular in the Fodorian sense. This is something not denied by evolutionary psychology. This essay then raises six objections to the MMH and concludes accordingly that even on the MMH conception of modularity, the central cognitive system need not be massively modular.