Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

is not as compelling or powerful as its proponents might hope. Perhaps one reason
for this is that it seeks a null result—the absence of an effect of cognitive content on
cognitive function. While cognitive penetrability can provide architectural evidence
for strong equivalence, other sources of evidence are likely required. One source of
such additional evidence is cognitive neuroscience.
3.14 Modularity of Mind
Classical cognitive science assumes that cognition is computation, and endorses
the physical symbol system hypothesis. As a result, it merges two theoretical positions
that in the seventeenth century were thought to be in conflict. The first is
Cartesian rationalism, the notion that the products of thought were rational conclusions
drawn from the rule-governed manipulation of pre-existing ideas. The second
is anti-Cartesian materialism, the notion that the processes of thought are carried
out by physical mechanisms.
The merging of rationalism and materialism has resulted in the modification of
a third idea, innateness, which is central to both Cartesian philosophy and classical
cognitive science. According to Descartes, the contents of some mental states were
innate, and served as mental axioms that permitted the derivation of new content
(Descartes, 1996, 2006). Variations of this claim can be found in classical cognitive
science (Fodor, 1975). However, it is much more typical for classical cognitive science
to claim innateness for the mechanisms that manipulate content, instead of
claiming it for the content itself. According to classical cognitive science, it is the
architecture that is innate.
Innateness is but one property that can serve to constrain theories about the
nature of the architecture (Newell, 1990). It is a powerful assumption that leads
to particular predictions. If the architecture is innate, then it should be universal
(i.e., shared by all humans), and it should develop in a systematic pattern that can
be linked to biological development. These implications have guided a tremendous
amount of research in linguistics over the last several decades (Jackendoff, 2002).
However, innateness is but one constraint, and many radically different architectural
proposals might all be consistent with it. What other constraints might be
applied to narrow the field of potential architectures?
Another constraining property is modularity (Fodor, 1983). Modularity is the
claim that an information processor is not just one homogeneous system used to
handle every information processing problem, but is instead a collection of specialpurpose
processors, each of which is especially suited to deal with a narrower range
of more specific problems. Modularity offers a general solution to what is known as
the packing problem (Ballard, 1986).
Elements of Classical Cognitive Science 113