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

I should like to propose a generalization; one which I fondly hope will someday
come to be known as ‘Fodor’s First Law of the Nonexistence of Cognitive Science.’
It goes like this: the more global (e.g., the more isotropic) a cognitive process is, the
less anybody understands it. (Fodor, 1983, p. 107)
Fodor’s (1983) position that explanations of isotropic processes are impossible
poses a strong challenge to a different field of study, called evolutionary psychology
(Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992), which is controversial in its own right
(Stanovich, 2004). Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain how psychological
processes arose via evolution. This requires the assumption that these processes provide
some survival advantage and are associated with a biological substrate, so that
they are subject to natural selection. However, many of the processes of particular
interest to evolutionary psychologists involve reasoning, and so would be classified
by Fodor as being isotropic. If they are isotropic, and if Fodor’s first law of the nonexistence
of cognitive science is true, then evolutionary psychology is not possible.
Evolutionary psychologists have responded to this situation by proposing the
massive modularity hypothesis (Carruthers, 2006; Pinker, 1994, 1997), an alternative
to Fodor (1983). According to the massive modularity hypothesis, most cognitive
processes—including high-level reasoning—are modular. For instance, Pinker
(1994, p. 420) has proposed that modular processing underlies intuitive mechanics,
intuitive biology, intuitive psychology, and the self-concept. The mind is “a collection
of instincts adapted for solving evolutionarily significant problems—the mind
as a Swiss Army knife” (p. 420). The massive modularity hypothesis proposes to
eliminate isotropic processing from cognition, spawning modern discussions about
how modules should be defined and about what kinds of processing are modular or
not (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006; Bennett, 1990; Fodor, 2000; Samuels, 1998).
The modern debate about massive modularity indicates that the concept of
module is firmly entrenched in cognitive science. The issue in the debate is not the
existence of modularity, but is rather modularity’s extent. With this in mind, let us
return to the methodological issue at hand, investigating the nature of the architecture.
To briefly introduce the types of evidence that can be employed to support
claims about modularity, let us consider another topic made controversial by proponents
of massive modularity: the modularity of musical cognition.
As we have seen, massive modularity theorists see a pervasive degree of specialization
and localization in the cognitive architecture. However, one content area
that these theorists have resisted to classify as modular is musical cognition. One
reason for this is that evolutionary psychologists are hard pressed to explain how
music benefits survival. “As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music
is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren,
or accurate perception and prediction of the world” (Pinker, 1997, p. 528).
As a result, musical processing is instead portrayed as a tangential, nonmodular
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