Customer Reviews

The Modularity of Mind

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Fodor's short book made "faculty psychology" respectable again and has generated a large literature in psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. Fodor offers brilliant arguments that the mind has special-purpose perceptual and linguistic modules. A central thesis of Fodor's book is that these modules are "informationally encapsulated" -- that is, the modules do their work without being able to access the beliefs that the person has. Thus in an important sense perception is theory-neutral, because what you believe will not affect what you see, hear, etc. For a contrasting view, read chapter two of Paul Churchland's Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Perception. By the way, Fodor's book is brilliant, but don't look for the entertainingly malicious flashes of humor that typify many of his essays.

This classic in cognitive science has a great deal to say, but an awkward way of saying it. Author Jerry A. Fodor's style is academic and dense, a potential barrier to all but the most determined, well-prepared reader. Arcane and brilliant, Fodor intersperses colloquial jests with jargon-burdened exposition, leading one to believe that he could have written a book more accessible to the lay reader had he wished to do so. We find, however, that the book repays the persistent, dedicated reader. The reward is a fascinating exploration of the mind, drawing on the literature of epistemology and psychology, with occasional detours down the rarely explored byways of phrenology.

This book really set the agenda in thinking about cognitive architecture for many approaches in thinking about the mind during the late 80s and 90s. In some ways, it is philosophical synthesis of concrete gains from research science in linguistics and cognitive psychology. But it also articulates the path down which much recent thinking has gone. The issue of modularity is getting hot now, especially with the business about evolutionary psychology. This and Fodor's _Psychosemantics_ are *the* texts of recent theoretical cognitive science (if you ask me). Oh, and it doesn't have too many obscurely humorous bits designed to confuse you, as some other of his books do.

Fodor usually writes the most arcane books in the cog sci set. The Language of Thought was so opaque that even Hilary Putnam couldn't understand it (circa Language and Learning by Piatelli-Palmarini, ed). This book is written in such a way that even lunkheads such as myself can get it. What he's saying in Psychosemantics I don't know either. But it's nice that he's written one popular philosophy book. When you take this book, together with Stephen Wolfram, you probably get the Language of Thought. When you add Richard Dawkins you get Steven Pinker. Not a bad piece of work.