Monday, May 09, 2011

Not an Arcane Issue?: The Modularity or Non-Modularity of the Brain (Mind)

In a recent book review in the London Review of Books the witty and irreverent Rutgers philosopher Jerry Fodor again attacks the thesis of the "massive modularity" of the mind. See Fodor, "Massively Modular Minds," 33 LRB No. 9 (April 28, 2011). This controversy may seem arcane -- and it is -- but the question of whether the mind amounts to nothing more than a clump of distinct adaptive parts -- parts produced only by Darwinian natural selection -- has a bearing on the question of the extent to which explicit rational deliberation -- or what passes for rational deliberation -- can influence the inferences that human beings ought to draw from evidence. Cf. the blog post:
Do You Believe in Sociobiology and the Law? - Chapter II (October 21, 2007)
See also the brief discussion associated with Figure 3 of the following blog post:

Friday, October 16, 2009


Brain Science: A Meditation on Mechanical Lie Detection

Drawing Inferences about "Deception" from Observed Events in the Brain:
Of fMRI and Similar Purported Tools for Observing or Inferring States of the Human Mind and Heart




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The dynamic evidence page
It's here: the law of evidence on Spindle Law. See also this post and this post.

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