Fodor book, part 1

for mental faculties, as for bodily organs, ontogenetic development is to be viewed as the unfolding of an "intrinsically determined process"

distinction between neo-cartesian and epiricist theories of mind
- innate knowledge, organs, modules
- blank slate where all knowledge is from observation

Chomsky:
what's innately represented must be/have propositional content
because it must interact with linguistic data
those interactions are assumed to be computational

but memory couldn't be innate in that way. it's more like a mechanism than a set of rules.
Plato's faculty psychology was spacially differentiated - birdcage for memories
Fodor's is functionally differentiated, leaving open whether there are locations in the brain for each

mental processes are computational insofar as they're cognitive
what is instinctive is genetically determined, but the reverse doesn't have to hold

vertical faculties:
- domain specific
- genetically determined
- distinct neural structures
- computationally autonomous

traditional faculty psychologists and associationists would agree on the virtual architecture of cognitive capacities, perhaps, but would disagree on the nature of the virtual architecture: whether it's direct faculty, or a construct (computation?) that makes the association between inputs and outputs.

Fodor asks: why would anything other than the virtual architecture be of interest to psychologists? why should anyone care whether faculties are assembled? if they're assembled, we could get to the primitive elements of cognition, and thereby have a way at an empiricist theory of cognitive development. (associationists) (environment to mental states by learning)

neurological speculation that the physical architecture closely parallels the virtual architecture.
do environmental conditions alter neural connectivity (specificity) on a large scale, or does the brain innately have large structures that aren't alterable? (presumably both sides would accept that small changes happen)
- reason for stressing the distinction between virtual and physical architecture is the exhibit thr actual organization of the mind a sjust one of the possibilities that could have been realized had the environment dictated an alternative arrangement of the computational elements. 36

taxonomy of systems:
- vertical vs. horizontal cog. org. -> domain specific or cross-domain operations?
- computation system innately specified, or formed by learning?
- assembled of stock elementary processes, or does virtual arch. map directly onto neural implementation?
- hardwired localized elaborately structured or implemented by relatively equipotential mechanisms?
- computationally autonomous, or share resources (memory, attention...) w/ other cog systems?

Fodor's view:
will all be fuzzy answers, but roughly,
modular systems are domain specific, innately specified, hardwired, autonomous, and not assembled.
(vertical follows)

- the set of processors for which the modularity view currently seems most convincing is coextensive with a functionally definable set of the cognitive systems
- there is some (more or less a priori) reson to believe that cognitive systems which do not belong to that functionally defined subset may be, in important respects, nonmodular
- our cognitive science has made approximately no progress in studying [putatively nonmodular processes like thought and fixation of belief] and this may well be because of their nonmodularity.