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Massively modular minds: Evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture

In Peter Carruthers & Andrew Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Cambridge University Press. pp. 13--46 (2000)

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  1. Introduction: Modularity and the Nature of Emotions.Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet - 2006 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 32.
    In this introduction, we give a brief overview of the main concepts of modularity that have been offered in recent literature. After this, we turn to a summary of the papers collected in this volume. Our primary aim is to explain how the modularity of emotion question relates to traditional debates in emotion theory.
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  • Cognitive Modularity, Biological Modularity and Evolvability.Claudia Lorena García - 2007 - Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution and Cognition (KLI) 2 (1):62-73.
    There is an argument that has recently been deployed in favor of thinking that the mind is mostly (or even exclusively) composed of cognitive modules; an argument that draws from some ideas and concepts of evolutionary and of developmental biology. In a nutshell, the argument concludes that a mind that is massively composed of cognitive mechanisms that are cognitively modular (henceforth, c-modular) is more evolvable than a mind that is not c-modular (or that is scarcely c-modular), since a cognitive mechanism (...)
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  • Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationism.Samir Okasha - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (1):68-88.
    This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an exception to the (...)
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • Commentary/Elqayam & Evans: Subtracting “ought” from “is”.Natalie Gold, Andrew M. Colman & Briony D. Pulford - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5).
    Normative theories can be useful in developing descriptive theories, as when normative subjective expected utility theory is used to develop descriptive rational choice theory and behavioral game theory. “Ought” questions are also the essence of theories of moral reasoning, a domain of higher mental processing that could not survive without normative considerations.
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  • Evolutionary psychology, adaptation and design.Stephen M. Downes - 2015 - In Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein (eds.), Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Springer. pp. 659-673.
    I argue that Evolutionary Psychologists’ notion of adaptationism is closest to what Peter Godfrey-Smith (2001) calls explanatory adaptationism and as a result, is not a good organizing principle for research in the biology of human behavior. I also argue that adopting an alternate notion of adaptationism presents much more explanatory resources to the biology of human behavior. I proceed by introducing Evolutionary Psychology and giving some examples of alternative approaches to the biological explanation of human behavior. Next I characterize adaptation (...)
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  • Could sexual selection have made us psychological altruists.Tom Walker - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (1):153-162.
    Psychological altruism (being motivated by the needs of others) has a tendency to produce behaviour that is costly in evolutionary terms. How, then, could the capacity for psychological altruism evolve? One suggestion is that it is the result of sexual selection. There are, however, two problems that face such an account: first, it is not clear that the resulting behaviour would be altruistic in the relevant sense, and second, it does not seem to fit with key features of our actual (...)
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  • An epistemological problem for evolutionary psychology.Matthew Ratcliffe - 2005 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 19 (1):47-63.
    This article draws out an epistemological tension implicit in Cosmides and Tooby's conception of evolutionary psychology. Cosmides and Tooby think of the mind as a collection of functionally individuated, domain-specific modules. Although they do not explicitly deny the existence of domain-general processes, it will be shown that their methodology commits them to the assumption that only domain-specific cognitive processes are capable of producing useful outputs. The resultant view limits the scope of biologically possible cognitive accomplishments and these limitations, it will (...)
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  • Moderately massive modularity.Peter Carruthers - 2003 - In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons. Cambridge University Press. pp. 67-89.
    This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind’s structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
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  • Modules and mindreaders.Matteo Mameli - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (3):377-93.
    There are many interesting empirical and theoretical issues concerning the evolution of cognition. Despite this, recent books on the topic concentrate on two problems. One is mental modularity. The other is what distinguishes human from non-human minds. While it is easy to understand why people are interested in human uniqueness, it is not clear why modularity is the centre of attention. Fodor (2000) has a nice argument for why people _should_ be interested in modularity.
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  • Massive Modularity: An Ontological Hypothesis or an Adaptationist Discovery Heuristic?David Villena - 2023 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 36 (4):317-334.
    Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesise that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Is the massive modularity of mind hypothesis a cogent view about the ontological nature of human mind or is it, rather, an effective/ineffective adaptationist discovery heuristic for generating predictively successful hypotheses about both heretofore unknown psychological traits and unknown properties of already identified psychological traits? Considering the inadequacies of the case in (...)
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  • Massive modularity : an ontological hypothesis or an adaptationist discovery heuristic?Joseph David de Jesús Villena Saldaña - 2021 - Dissertation, Lingnan University
    Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesize that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Modules are also invoked to explain cognitive capacities associated with the performance of specific functional tasks. Jerry Fodor (1983) considered that modules are useful only for explaining relatively low-level systems (input systems). These are the systems involved in capacities like perception and language. For Fodor, the central (high-level) systems of mind — (...)
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • Is Your Neural Data Part of Your Mind? Exploring the Conceptual Basis of Mental Privacy.Abel Wajnerman Paz - 2022 - Minds and Machines 32 (2):395-415.
    It has been argued that neural data are an especially sensitive kind of personal information that could be used to undermine the control we should have over access to our mental states, and therefore need a stronger legal protection than other kinds of personal data. The Morningside Group, a global consortium of interdisciplinary experts advocating for the ethical use of neurotechnology, suggests achieving this by treating legally ND as a body organ. Although the proposal is currently shaping ND-related policies, it (...)
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  • Heuristics, Concepts, and Cognitive Architecture: Toward Understanding How The Mind Works.Sheldon J. Chow - unknown
    Heuristics are often invoked in the philosophical, psychological, and cognitive science literatures to describe or explain methodological techniques or "shortcut" mental operations that help in inference, decision-making, and problem-solving. Yet there has been surprisingly little philosophical work done on the nature of heuristics and heuristic reasoning, and a close inspection of the way(s) in which "heuristic" is used throughout the literature reveals a vagueness and uncertainty with respect to what heuristics are and their role in cognition. This dissertation seeks to (...)
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  • Moderately Massive Modularity.Peter Carruthers - 2003 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53:67-89.
    This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind's structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
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  • Diversity and Unity of Modularity.Bongrae Seok - 2006 - Cognitive Science 30 (2):347-380.
    Since the publication of Fodor's (1983) The Modularity of Mind, there have been quite a few discussions of cognitive modularity among cognitive scientists. Generally, in those discussions, modularity means a property of specialized cognitive processes or a domain-specific body of information. In actuality, scholars understand modularity in many different ways. Different characterizations of modularity and modules were proposed and discussed, but they created misunderstanding and confusion. In this article, I classified and analyzed different approaches to modularity and argued for the (...)
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  • The Evolution of the Human Self: Tracing the Natural History of Self‐Awareness.Mark R. Leary & Nicole R. Buttermore - 2003 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 33 (4):365-404.
    Previous discussions of the evolution of the self have diverged greatly in their estimates of the date at which the capacity for self-thought emerged, the factors that led self-reflection to evolve, and the nature of the evidence offered to support these disparate conclusions. Beginning with the assumption that human self-awareness involves a set of distinct cognitive abilities that evolved at different times to solve different adaptive problems, we trace the evolution of self-awareness from the common ancestor of humans and apes (...)
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  • Rationality and psychology.Richard Samuels & Stephen Stich - 2004 - In Alfred R. Mele & Piers Rawling (eds.), The Oxford handbook of rationality. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 279-300.
    Samuels and Stich explore the debate over the extent to which ordinary human reasoning and decision making is rational. One prominent cluster of views, often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition in psychology, maintains that human reasoning is, in important respects, normatively problematic or irrational. Samuels and Stich start by sketching some key experimental findings from this tradition and describe a range of pessimistic claims about the rationality of ordinary people that these and related findings are sometimes taken to (...)
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  • Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences.Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein (eds.) - 2015 - Springer.
    The Darwinian theory of evolution is itself evolving and this book presents the details of the core of modern Darwinism and its latest developmental directions. The authors present current scientific work addressing theoretical problems and challenges in four sections, beginning with the concepts of evolution theory, its processes of variation, heredity, selection, adaptation and function, and its patterns of character, species, descent and life. The second part of this book scrutinizes Darwinism in the philosophy of science and its usefulness in (...)
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  • Evolutionary Psychology.Stephen M. Downes - 2014 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is an updated version of my Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Evolutionary Psychology. The 2018 version contains a new section on Human Nature as well as some new material on recent developments in Evolutionary Psychology.
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  • Culture and cognitive science.Jesse Prinz - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Cognitive Science and Religious Belief.Graham Wood - 2011 - Philosophy Compass 6 (10):734-745.
    The cognitive science of religion draws on insights from evolutionary psychology, and offers explanations of religious belief based on natural cognitive processes. This article examines a number of competing explanations of religious belief by considering it as a solution to the challenge of cooperation. The challenge of stopping individuals cheating within a cooperative group has been a problem throughout humanity’s evolutionary history. Empirical evidence drawn from fields such as anthropology and psychology suggests that religious beliefs are part of an evolved (...)
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  • A partial defense of intuition on naturalist grounds.Joseph Shieber - 2012 - Synthese 187 (2):321-341.
    The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...)
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  • Emil Brunner revisited: On the cognitive science of religion, the imago Dei, and revelation.Taede A. Smedes - 2014 - Zygon 49 (1):190-207.
    This article aims at a constructive and argumentative engagement between the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and philosophical and theological reflection on the imago Dei. The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner argued that the theological notion that humans were created in the image of God entails that there is a “point of contact” for revelation to occur. This article argues that Brunner's notion resonates quite strongly with the findings of the CSR. The first part will give a short overview of the (...)
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  • Modularity of Mind.Philip Robbins - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conception of modularity than the one advanced by (...)
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  • Concepts and the modularity of thought.Daniel A. Weiskopf - 2010 - Dialectica 64 (1):107-130.
    Having concepts is a distinctive sort of cognitive capacity. One thing that conceptual thought requires is obeying the Generality Constraint: concepts ought to be freely recombinable with other concepts to form novel thoughts, independent of what they are concepts of. Having concepts, then, constrains cognitive architecture in interesting ways. In recent years, spurred on by the rise of evolutionary psychology, massively modular models of the mind have gained prominence. I argue that these architectures are incapable of satisfying the Generality Constraint, (...)
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  • Towards an Evolutionary Model of Argumentation.Andrew Kidd - unknown
    Toulmin’s original models of argumentation and human reasoning are reexamined in this paper from the perspective of evolutionary and cognitive theory. On the basis of recent work done from the biological and adaptationist perspectives in communication studies, it is to be demonstrated how neo-Darwinian and cognitive psychology may provide the platform for an understanding of the relationship of argumentation to human reasoning and communicative faculties. The Toulmin’s notions of field dependence and independence in argument are then reexamined and reappraised in (...)
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  • Culture and modularity.Dan Sperber & Lawrence Hirschfeld - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented (...)
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  • The Return of the "Tabula Rasa". [REVIEW]Alex Rosenberg - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2):476 - 497.
    Thought in a Hostile World1 has four ostensible aims: …[1] to develop and vindicate a set of analytical tools for thinking about cognition and its evolution… [2] to develop a substantive theory of the evolution of human uniqueness… [3] to explore, from this evolutionary perspective, the relationship between folk psychology and an integrated scientific conception of human cognition… [4] to develop a critique of, and an alternative to, nativist, modular versions of evolutionary psychology (p. viii). Of these four aims, the (...)
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  • Could sexual selection have made us psychological altruists?Tom Walker - 2008 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (1):153-162.
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  • Are Plants Rational?Elias L. Khalil - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (1):53-66.
    Organisms change their shape and behavior during ontogenesis in response to incentives—what biologists call “phenotypic plasticity” or what is called here more specifically “behavioral plasticity.” Such plasticity is usually in the direction of enhancing welfare or fitness. In light of basic concepts in economics, such behavioral plasticity is nothing but rationality. Such rationality is not limited to organisms with neural systems. It also characterizes brainless organisms such as plants, fungi, and unicellular organisms. The gist of the article is the distinction (...)
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