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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2
Against Modularity
William Marslen - Wilson and
LorraineKomisarjevsky Tyler
The fundamental claim of the modularity hypothesis (Fodor 1983) is that
the process of prehension - of mapping from the speech
signal onto a message-level interpretation - is not a single, unitary process
but involves at least two different kinds of process.! There is a modular ,
highly constrained , automatized "input system" that operates blindly on
its bottom -up input to deliver , as rapidly as neurally possible, a shallow
linguistic representation to a second kind of process, labeled by Fodor a
"central process." This second type of process relates the output of the
modular input system to the listener's knowledge of the world , of the
discourse content, and so on. In particular, these central processesare respon-
sible for the fixation of perceptual belief .
To justify this dichotomy between , kinds of mental process, Fodor
marshals a list of properties that input systems have and that central
processes do not have. These include domain specificity , mandatoriness,
speed, informational encapsulation, and a number of less critical properties .
We do not dispute that there are some IIcentral processes" that do not
share these properties . Our argument here, heless, is that those pro -
cesses that map onto discourse representations and that also participate in
tbe fixation of perceptual belief in fact share many of the special properties
that Fodor treats as diagnostic of modular input systems.
We will argue on this basis that the modularity hypothesis gives the
wrong kind o