The Modularity of mind. An essay on faculty psychology

By Jerry A. Fodor. 1986

This monograph synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory. Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviours. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor’s work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architecture but also of current research in artificial intelligence. – Part I. Four accounts of mental structure; – Part II. A functional taxonomy of cognitive mechanisms; – Part III. Input systems as modules; – Part IV. Central systems; – Part V. Caveats and conclusions. M.-M. V.

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, background): “To date, though, visual rather than multisensory cases have constituted the primary focus in previous reviews (e.g., Bruner, 1957; Fodor, 1983; Pylyshyn, 1999; Vetter and Newen, 2014; Firestone and Scholl, 2016).”
Routing Networks and the Challenges of Modular and Compositional Computation (2019, background): “…science, where the nature of cognitive task-specific modules and the implementation details of compositional computation have been highly debated [Fodor, 1975, 1983, Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1988, Touretzky and Hinton, 1988, Smolensky, 1988, i.a.].1 Among others, there are two notable early attempts…”
Coordination Among Neural Modules Through a Shared Global Workspace (2021, background): “This work taps into a line of reasoning put forward by historical works, such as (Minsky, 1988; Braitenberg, 1986; Fodor, 1983), wherein it is argued that in order to be able to deal with a wide spectrum of conditions and tasks, an intelligent system should be comprised of many interacting specializ”
Plug-and-Play VQA: Zero-shot VQA by Conjoining Large Pretrained Models with Zero Training (2022, background): “For instance, the pioneering work of Fodor (1983) argued that the low-level human cognition is constituted of several fast, autonomous, and domain-speciﬁc modules.”
An integrated theory of the mind. (2004, background): “…these buffers and make changes to these buffers, as, for instance, when it makes a request to perform an action in the manual buffer. the terms of Fodor (1983), the information in these modules is largely encapsulated, and the modules communicate only through the information they make available…”
Accessing Different Types of Lexical Semantic Information: Evidence From Priming (1995, background): “This link would represent only the fact that there is a high probability of the form dog occurring shortly after the form cat, and not encode anything about the meaning relation between them (Chiarello, Burgess, Richards, & Pollock, 1990; Fodor, 1983; Lupker, 1984; Moss & Marslen-Wilson, 1993; Shelt”
The effect of syntactic constraints on the processing of backwards anaphora (2007, background): “…can be formed, whereas computation of its morphological properties 'is delayed until after the computation of coreference relations' (p. 128), and thus argue that syntactic category information has an architectural priority in parsing (e.g., Cowart & Cairns, 1987; Fodor, 1983; Frazier, 1987).”
Beyond behaviorism: on the automaticity of higher mental processes. (2000, background): “The effect on behavior of abstract semantic representations activated by perceptual activity is, of course, not obligatory (see Fodor, 1983).”
Age-related changes in modular organization of human brain functional networks (2009, unknown): “Modularity is a word with many meanings in neuroscience (Fodor, 1983; Zeki and Bartels, 1998; Redies and Puelles, 2001; Callebaut and Rasskin-Gutman, 2005).”
The Invariance Hypothesis Implies Domain-Specific Regions in Visual Cortex (2014, background): “These considerations lead to a view of the ventral visual pathway in which category-selective regions implement a modularity of content rather than process [48, 49].”
Fears, phobias, and preparedness: toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. (2001, background): “Just as our body is composed of a number of independent organs serving survival and procreation, behavioral and mental systems can be thought of as composed of organs or independent modules (e.g., Fodor, 1983).”