What Computations (Still, Still) Can't Do: Jerry Fodor on Computation and Modularity

Jerry Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (2000; hereafter Mind) purports to do a number of things. To name three: First, it aims to show what is problematic about recent evolutionary psychology, especially as popularized in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997). Fodor's particular target here is the rose-coloured view of evolutionary psychology as offering a “new synthesis” in integrating computational psychology with evolutionary theory. Second, Fodor's book poses a series of related, in-principle problems for any cognitive theory that revolve around the putative tension between the local nature of computational processing and the global nature of at least some cognitive processing. And third, it reiterates Fodor's earlier argument, in The Modularity of Mind, for the hopelessness of trying to extend the notion of modularity from “input systems” to “central systems.“