page_title: Jerry Fodor
section_title: The functional architecture of the mind
hierarchical_section_title: Jerry Fodor / The functional architecture of the mind
caption_attribution_description: English: Phrenology diagram
context_page_description: Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."
  Fodor argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the brain and not just a useful explanatory tool.
context_section_description: Following in the path paved by linguist Noam Chomsky, Fodor developed a strong commitment to the idea of psychological nativism. Nativism postulates the innateness of many cognitive functions and concepts. For Fodor, this position emerges naturally out of his criticism of behaviourism and associationism. These criticisms also led him to the formulation of his hypothesis of the modularity of the mind.
  Historically, questions about mental architecture have been divided into two contrasting theories about the nature of the faculties. The first can be described as a "horizontal" view because it sees mental processes as interactions between faculties which are not domain specific. For example, a judgment remains a judgment whether it is judgment about a perceptual experience or a judgment about the understanding of language. The second can be described as a "vertical" view because it claims that our mental faculties are domain specific, genetically determined, associated with distinct neurological structures, and so on.
  The vertical vision can be traced back to the 19th century movement called phrenology and its founder Franz Joseph Gall. Gall claimed that mental faculties could be associated with specific physical areas of the brain. Hence, someone's level of intelligence, for example, could be literally "read off" from the size of a particular bump on his posterior parietal lobe. This simplistic view of modularity has been disproved over the course of the last century.
  Fodor revived the idea of modularity, without the notion of precise physical localizability, in the 1980s, and became one of the most vocal proponents of it with the 1983 publication of his monograph The Modularity of Mind, where he points to Gall through Bernard Hollander, which is the author cited in the references instead, more specifically Hollander's In search of the soul. Two properties of modularity in particular, informational encapsulation and domain specificity, make it possible to tie together questions of functional architecture with those of mental content. The ability to elaborate information independently from the background beliefs of individuals that these two properties allow Fodor to give an atomistic and causal account of the notion of mental content. The main idea, in other words, is that the properties of the contents of mental states can depend, rather than exclusively on the internal relations of the system of which they are a part, also on their causal relations with the external world.
  Fodor's notions of mental modularity, informational encapsulation and domain specificity were taken up and expanded, much to Fodor's chagrin, by cognitive scientists such as Zenon Pylyshyn and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, among many others. But Fodor complained that Pinker, Plotkin and other members of what he sarcastically called "the New Synthesis" have taken modularity and similar ideas way too far. He insisted that the mind is not "massively modular" and that, contrary to what these researchers would have us believe, the mind is still a very long way from having been explained by the computational, or any other, model.
caption: The ideas of modularity of mind have predecessors in the 19th-century movement of phrenology founded by Franz Joseph Gall.
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