The Architecture of the Mind - Peter Carruthers

Peter Carruthers' The Architecture of the Mind argues for, elaborates, and defends a version of the massive modularity hypothesis, according to which the human mind is composed of a great many functionally specialized components, or modules. The book consists of seven main chapters, plus a short conclusion. The first three chapters make the case for massive modularity. Ch. 1 begins by isolating the notion of modularity appropriate to the thesis that central cognition is modular, distinguishing it from the concept developed by Fodor for input and output systems. Central (‘conceptual’) modules, Carruthers argues, are function‐specific automatic processing systems, which are partly independent of one another, and whose internal operations are largely inaccessible to the rest of cognition. The chapter then sets out three arguments for the view that the human mind is massively modular in this sense – from design (complex evolved systems are typically built out of distinct sub‐components); from animals (it is very likely that animal minds are massively modular, and it would be extraordinary if this architecture had not been inherited by hominins); and from computational tractability (mental processes are computational, and in order to be tractable, the computations involved must be performed by subsystems that are computationally frugal, though not necessarily encapsulated in the traditional sense).