About the book
Jerry A. Fodor argues that cognitive scientists still know little about how the mind works. He takes aim at three widely held views: that mental processes are mostly computations, that cognition is massively modular, and that our innate mental structure has a largely Darwinian explanation. Fodor still counts the computational theory as the best account available, but treats it as only a fragment of the truth. Along the way he separates Chomsky's version of nativism from the New Synthesis approach. The title alludes to Steve Pinker's How the Mind Works, and Fodor concludes that there are no grounds to call most of the mind modular, yet no account of how nonmodular cognition could work.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb praised it as a candid attack on the computational theory of mind that even targets ideas from Fodor's own The Modularity of Mind.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Flaneur)
This critique of the computational theory of mind and the pan-adaptionist tradition is clearly so honest that it goes after the ideas promoted by Fodor's own 1983 watershed book "The Modularity of Mind". In brief the essay is an attack on massive modularity by saying that there are things after all that escape the programming (encapsulation and opacity are key: how can we talk about something OPAQUE? We know nothing about a few critical things...).
Granted the book is horribly written (that is Fodor's charm after all) but his argumentation is so ferocious that he ends up loud & clear.
The man is critical of his own ideas, and of the current in thought that he he helped create --one may use Fodor-1 against Fodor-2. Perhaps persons I hold in highest respect are those who go after their own ideas!
Bravo Fodor. Even if I do not agree I can't help admiring the man.
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