文档介绍：This excerpt from
Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural-Language
Understanding.
Jay L. Garfield, editor.
© 1991 The MIT Press.
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1
Modules, Frames, Fridgeons, Sleeping Dogs,
and the Music of the Spheres
Jerry A . Fodor
There are, it seems to me, two interesting ideas about modularity . The first
is the idea that some of our cognitive faculties are modular . The second is
the idea that some of our cognitive faculties are not .
By a modular cognitive faculty I mean- for present purposes- an
Ilinformationally encapsulated" cognitive faculty. By an informationally
encapsulatedcognitive faculty I mean one that has access, in the courseof
putations, to less than all of the information at the disposal of the
organism whose cognitive faculty it is, the restriction on informational
accessbeing imposed by relatively unlabile, IIarchitectural " features of
anization. For example, I think that the persistence of the
Muller-Lyer illusion in spite of one's knowledge that it is an illusion
strongly suggests that some of the cognitive mechanismsthat mediate
visual size perception must be informationally encapsulated. You know
perfectly well that the lines are the samelength , yet it continuesto appear
to you that they are not . It would seem to follow that some of what you
know perfectly well is essibleto the cognitive mechanismsthat are
determining the appearances. If this is the right diagnosis, then it follows
that some of those mechanismsare informationally encapsulated.
It is worth emphasizinga sensein which modular cognitive processingis
ipso facto irrational . After all, by definition modular processing means
arriving at conclusions by attending to arbitrarily less than all of