91
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

Massive Modularity: An Ontological Hypothesis or an Adaptationist Discovery Heuristic?

ORCID Icon
Pages 317-334 | Received 15 Jul 2022, Accepted 25 Oct 2023, Published online: 07 Nov 2023

References

  • Al-Shawaf, L. 2019. Seven key Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology. Areo Magazine. Retrieved from https://areomagazine.com/2019/08/20/seven-key-misconceptions-about-evolutionary-psychology/.
  • Baron-Cohen, S. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Barret, H. C. 2005. “Enzymatic Computation and Cognitive Modularity.” Mind and Language 20: 259–287. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00285.x.
  • Barret, H. C., and R. Kurzban. 2006. “Modularity in Cognition: Framing the Debate.” Psychological Review 113: 628–647. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.113.3.628.
  • Barrett, J. L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God?. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
  • Barrett, H. C. 2015a. “Modularity.” In Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology, edited by V. Zeigler-Hill, L. L. M. Welling, and T. K. Shackelford, 39–49. Dordrecht: Springer.
  • Barrett, H. C. 2015b. The Shape of Thought. How Mental Adaptations Evolve. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Buller, D. J. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Buller, D., and V. G. Hardcastle. 2000. “Evolutionary Psychology, Meet Developmental Neurobiology: Against Promiscuous Modularity.” Brain and Mind 1: 307–325. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011573226794.
  • Buss, D. M. 1999. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
  • Carruthers, P. 2003. “On Fodor’s Problem.” Mind and Language 18: 502–523. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00240.
  • Carruthers, P. 2006a. “Simple Heuristics Meet Massive Modularity.” In The Innate Mind, Vol 2. Culture and Cognition, edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich, 181–198. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Carruthers, P. 2006b. The Architecture of the Mind: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Carruthers, P. 2006c. “The Case for Massively Modular Models of Mind.” In Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, edited by R. J. Stainton, 3–21. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  • Carruthers, P. 2008. “On Fodor-Fixation, Flexibility, and Human Uniqueness: A Reply to Cowie, Machery, and Wilson.” Mind & Language 23: 293–303. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2008.00344.x.
  • Clark, A. 2013. “Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36: 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477.
  • Collins, J. A., and I. R. Olson. 2014. “Knowledge is Power: How Conceptual Knowledge Transforms Visual Cognition.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 21: 843–860. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-013-0564-3.
  • Coltheart, M. 1999. “Modularity and Cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 115–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01289-9.
  • Cosmides, L. 1989. “The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selection Shaped how Humans Reason? Studies with the Wason Selection Task.” Cognition 31: 187–276. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(89)90023-1.
  • Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. 1994. “Origins of Domain Specificity: The Evolution of Functional Organization.” In Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, edited by L. Hirschfeld, and S. Gelman, 85–116. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Cyrus, K., S. Schwarz, and M. Hassebrauck. 2011. “Systematic Cognitive Biases in Courtship Context: Women’s Commitment–Skepticism as a Life-History Strategy?” Evolution and Human Behavior 32: 13–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.07.006.
  • Daly, M., and M. Wilson. 1988. Homicide. , New York, NY: Aldine De Gruyter.
  • Duntley, J. D., and D. M. Buss. 2005. “The Plausibility of Adaptations for Homicide.” In The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich, 291–304. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Duntley, J. D., and D. M. Buss. 2011. “Homicide adaptations.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 16: 399–410.
  • Ermer, E., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. 2007. “Functional Specialization and the Adaptationist Program.” In The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies, edited by S. W. Gangestad, and J. A. Simpson, 153–160. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
  • Firestone, C., and B. J. Scholl. 2016. “Cognition Does not Affect Perception: Evaluating the Evidence for “top-Down” Effects.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39: E229. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X15000965.
  • Fodor, J. A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Fodor, J. A. 1987. “Modules, Frames, Fridgeons, Sleeping Dogs, and the Music of the Spheres.” In The Robot’s Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, edited by Z. W. Pylysyn, 139–149. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
  • Fodor, J. A. 2000. The Mind Doesn’t Work That way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Frankenhuis, W. E., and A. Ploeger. 2007. “Evolutionary Psychology Versus Fodor: Arguments for and Against the Massive Modularity Hypothesis.” Philosophical Psychology 20: 687–710. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515080701665904.
  • Gibbs, R. W., and G. C. Van Orden. 2010. “Adaptive Cognition Without Massive Modularity.” Language and Cognition 2: 149–176. https://doi.org/10.1515/langcog.2010.006.
  • Godfrey-Smith, P. 1999. “Adaptationism and the Power of Selection.” Biology & Philosophy 14: 181–194. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1006630232690.
  • Godfrey-Smith, P. 2001. “Three Kinds of Adaptationism.” In Adaptationism and Optimality, edited by S. H. Orzack, and E. Sober, 335–357. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Goldfinch, A. 2015. Rethinking Evolutionary Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Gould, S. J. January 12, 1997a. “Darwinian Fundamentalism.” The New York Review of Books, 34–37.
  • Gould, S. J. June 26, 1997b. “The Pleasures of Pluralism.” The New York Review of Books, 47–52.
  • Harbisson, N. June, 2012. Neil Harbisson: I listen to color [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color.
  • Haselton, M. G., and D. M. Buss. 2000. “Error Management Theory: A new Perspective on Biases in Cross-sex Mind Reading.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78: 81–91. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.81.
  • Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky. 1982. Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Lewontin, R. C. 1978. “Adaptation.” Scientific American 239: 212–230. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0978-212.
  • Machery, E. Forthcoming. “Discovery and Confirmation in Evolutionary Psychology.” In Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology, edited by J. Prinz. Oxford University Press.
  • Marr, D. 1976. “Early Processing of Visual Information.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 275: 483–519. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1976.0090.
  • Maynard Smith, J. 1978. “Optimization Theory in Evolution.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 9: 31–56. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.09.110178.000335.
  • Needham, J. 1933. “On the Dissociability of the Fundamental Processes in Ontogenesis.” Biological Reviews 8: 180–223. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-185X.1933.tb01153.x.
  • Pietraszewski, D., and A. E. Wertz. 2022. “Why Evolutionary Psychology Should Abandon Modularity.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 17: 465–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691621997113.
  • Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
  • Prinz, J. 2006. “Is the Mind Really Modular?” In Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, edited by R. J. Stainton, 22–36. Massachusetts, MA: Blackwell.
  • Rich, P., M. Blokpoel, R. de Haan, and I. van Rooij. 2020. “How Intractability Spans the Cognitive and Evolutionary Levels of Explanation.” Topics in Cognitive Science 12: 1382–1402. https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12506.
  • Rowbottom, D. P. 2019. The Instruments of Science: Scientific Anti-Realism Revisited. London: Routledge.
  • Samuels, R. 2000. “Massively Modular Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Architecture.” In Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, edited by P. Carruthers, and A. Chamberlain, 13–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Samuels, R. 2005. “The Complexity of Cognition: Tractability Arguments for Massive Modularity.” In The Innate Mind, Vol. 1. Structure and Contents, edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich, 107–121. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Sell, A. N. 2011. “The Recalibrational Theory and Violent Anger.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 16: 381–389. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2011.04.013.
  • Sell, A. N., D. Sznycer, L. Al-Shawaf, J. Lim, A. Krauss, A. Feldman, R. Rascanu, L. Sugiyama, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby. 2017. “The Grammar of Anger: Mapping the Computational Architecture of a Recalibrational Emotion.” Cognition 168: 110–128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.002.
  • Siegel, S. 2012. “Cognitive Penetrability and Perceptual Justification.” Noûs 46: 201–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00786.x.
  • Simon, H. A. 1962. “The Architecture of Complexity.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106: 467–482. http://www.jstor.org/stable/985254.
  • Sperber, D. 1994. “The Modularity of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations.” In Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, edited by L. Hirschfeld, and S. Gelman, 39–67. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
  • Sperber, D. 2001. “In Defense of Massive Modularity.” In Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler, edited by E. Dupoux, 47–57. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Sperber, D. 2005. “Modularity and Relevance: How Can a Massively Modular Mind be Flexible and Context-Sensitive?” In The Innate Mind, Vol. I. Structure and Contents, edited by P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich, 53–68. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Sterelny, K., and P. E. Griffiths. 1999. Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
  • Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. 1992. “The Psychological Foundations of Culture.” In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, edited by J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, 19–136. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
  • Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. 1995. Foreword to Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, edited by S. Baron-Cohen (pp. xi-xviii). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • van Rooij, I. 2008. “The Tractable Cognition Thesis.” Cognitive Science 32: 939–984. https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210801897856.
  • Wagner, G. P. 1996. “Homologues, Natural Kinds and the Evolution of Modularity.” American Zoologist 36: 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/36.1.36.
  • Wagner, G. P., and L. Altenberg. 1996. “Perspective: Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability.” Evolution 50: 967–976. https://doi.org/10.2307/2410639.
  • Wagner, G. P., J. Mezey, and R. Calabretta. 2005. “Natural Selection and the Origin of Modules.” In Modularity. Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems, edited by W. Callebaut, and D. Raskin-Gutman, 33–49. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.