Evolutionary Psychology Versus Fodor: Arguments For and Against the Massive Modularity Hypothesis

Abstract

Evolutionary psychologists tend to view the mind as a large collection of evolved, functionally specialized mechanisms, or modules. Cosmides and Tooby (1994) have presented four arguments in favor of this model of the mind: the engineering argument, the error argument, the poverty of the stimulus argument, and combinatorial explosion. Fodor (2000) has discussed each of these four arguments and rejected them all. In the present paper, we present and discuss the arguments for and against the massive modularity hypothesis. We conclude that Cosmides and Tooby's arguments have considerable force and are too easily dismissed by Fodor.

Keywords:

• Cognitive Architecture
• Domain Specificity
• Information Encapsulation
• Modularity

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to H. Clark Barrett, Denny Borsboom, Maarten Frankenhuis, Liesbeth van Haaften, Hiske Hees, Wolfram Hinzen, Cristina Moya, Karthik Panchanathan, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful discussion and comments. The first author was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, the Huygens Scholarship Programme, and the VSB Foundation—Nuffic. The second author was supported by a grant of the Evolution and Behaviour programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.