Re: RT list: question to D Wilson

On the first issue, it is worth consulting the work of Peter Carruthers (in
particular The Architecture of the Mind: massive modularity and the
flexibility of thought. OUP, 2006), who has long argued for modularity of
the mind, but where modules are not required to have all the properties of
what he calls a 'Fodor module', i.e. most people's conception of what
constitutes a mental module, following the work of Jerry Fodor. Importantly
for the issue you raise, one property that 'Carruthers modules' need not
have that Fodor modules do have is innateness. Thus Carruthers argues that
almost all cognition works via modules, but only a subset of these are
directly the product of genetic inheritance. The argument in the case of
your friend would be that she, in common with all literate people, did have
a dedicated reading/writing module (probably a sub-module for each), which
was unfortunately compromised by the stroke, but there would be no
suggestion that this module was innate. (There has clearly not been time
since the invention of writing for our species to evolve an innate module
for reading/writing.)

Best,

Chris Lucas.

On Jun 2 2009, Alessandro Capone wrote:

>I have been reading
>
>New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity.
>
>
>A propos of dedicated modules, a friend of mine has had a stroke and
>received damage in the brain:
>
>as a result (among other things), she can no longer read or write written
>texts - yet we can speak fluently and understand as any other normal human
>being (with the difference that she gets tired ).
>
>
>So, should we deduce there is a module or submodule for written symbols?
>
>
>Now a question to D Wilson:
>
>suppose that interrpetation e of utterance U in context C can be obtained
>through two different strategies:
>
>Inference through central systems: we call e'
>
>Inference through a dedicated inferential module : we call e''
>
>
>In order to avoid having two different processes for the same inference,
>we need to say that e' is slower than e'' and that once e'' is ready, the
>mechanims resulting in e' is blocked.
>
>Presumably cognitive effort is involved in this.
>
>But can we exclude cases when the two processes converge and one process
>checks what the other has done?
>
>
>Also we need to specify when the central system processes prevail - that
>is when conscious inferential mechanisms are activated.
>
>alessandro
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-- 
Chris Lucas
Emmanuel College
Cambridge CB2 3AP
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/cbl23/