new bits from tomorrow's presentation handout
Evolutionary Psychology and its critics:
Samuels: Massive modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture
EP says modules are domain-specific and innate.
Massive Modularity Hypothesis: like Fodor’s modules, except everything is modular, even the executive control mechanisms that he said were not modular.
unclear if informational-encapsulation is required. maybe taken as part of domain-specificity? unclear whether EP modules must be implemented by physiologically discrete neural structures, but how could they be domain-specific otherwise? can global characteristics or distributed structures implement modules?
do autistic kids demonstrate that there is a Theory of Mind module, or are they missing domain knowledge about other people’s minds?
evidence against innate domain-specific microcircuitry as a viable account of cortical development. do cortical plasticity and transplant studies in developmental biology undermine the idea of innate, domain-specific modules? (Quartz, Elman et al.)
Samuels says this criticism depends on a false assumption, Principle of Invariance: the innately specified properties of a piece of cortical tissue are invariant under alterations of location in the brain and the afferent inputs to it
what does innate mean?
Tissue Nativism: specific tissues have innate computational properties FALSE
Organism Nativism: it’s innately specified that organisms possess certain domain-specific cognitive structures TRUE?
But who would seriously propose tissue nativism?
and how would/could organism nativism happen? neural nets?
Additions to bibliography
Churchland, Sejnowski (1992) The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Elman et al. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Gazzaniga (1989) “Organization of the Human Brain” Science. Vol. 245, No. 4921, pp.947-952
Segal (1996) “The Modularity of Theory of Mind” in Carruthers and Smith eds. Theories of Theories of Mind. pp.141-157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Samuels: Massive modular minds: evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture
EP says modules are domain-specific and innate.
Massive Modularity Hypothesis: like Fodor’s modules, except everything is modular, even the executive control mechanisms that he said were not modular.
unclear if informational-encapsulation is required. maybe taken as part of domain-specificity? unclear whether EP modules must be implemented by physiologically discrete neural structures, but how could they be domain-specific otherwise? can global characteristics or distributed structures implement modules?
do autistic kids demonstrate that there is a Theory of Mind module, or are they missing domain knowledge about other people’s minds?
evidence against innate domain-specific microcircuitry as a viable account of cortical development. do cortical plasticity and transplant studies in developmental biology undermine the idea of innate, domain-specific modules? (Quartz, Elman et al.)
Samuels says this criticism depends on a false assumption, Principle of Invariance: the innately specified properties of a piece of cortical tissue are invariant under alterations of location in the brain and the afferent inputs to it
what does innate mean?
Tissue Nativism: specific tissues have innate computational properties FALSE
Organism Nativism: it’s innately specified that organisms possess certain domain-specific cognitive structures TRUE?
But who would seriously propose tissue nativism?
and how would/could organism nativism happen? neural nets?
Additions to bibliography
Churchland, Sejnowski (1992) The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Elman et al. (1996) Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Gazzaniga (1989) “Organization of the Human Brain” Science. Vol. 245, No. 4921, pp.947-952
Segal (1996) “The Modularity of Theory of Mind” in Carruthers and Smith eds. Theories of Theories of Mind. pp.141-157. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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