[Review of the book The Architecture of the Mind: Massive Modularity and the Flexibility of Thought, by Parruthers]

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Brigandt, Ingo

• Introduction: Recent cognitive developmental psychology lend support to the idea that the mind consists of distinct domain-specific modules (e.g., a folk physics, a folk biology, and a folk psychological mind-reading module), rather than a single all-purpose reasoning system. In evolutionary psychology, it is popular to assume that there are different cognitive modules which evolved as adaptations meeting different evolutionary problems (e.g., a mate recognition and a cheater detection module). Yet different notions of 'module' might be used by different cognitive scientists; and massive modularity - the idea that the whole mind consists of a large number of substantially dissociated modules - is quite controversial, and clearly denied, e.g., by proponents of distributed connectionism. In this book Carruthers offers a detailed defense of the massive modularity hypothesis, based on an impressive review of the literature in cognitive and evolutionary psychology. The book is divided into two parts. Chapters 1-3 lay out Carruthers' notion of module and argue that the mind is massively modular in this sense. Chapters 4-7 address how to account for the flexibility and creativity of human theoretical and practical reasoning. This is a major issue for any account of the mind, but flexibility is particularly challenging for a proponent of massive modularity, given the idea that a module can only hold content specific to its domain and has limited connections to other modules.

• Date created

  2008

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Book Reviews
  • Philosophy
  • Cognition

• Type of Item

  Review

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R34B2XK3J

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International