Work · Analytic Philosophy
The Modularity of Mind
Perception and language are handled by fast, encapsulated input modules; central thinking, by contrast, is holistic and hard to explain.
Introduction
The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (1983) revives the old idea of distinct mental faculties in a new form. Fodor distinguishes transducers, input systems and central systems. Input systems – perception and language comprehension – are modules: specific to a domain, mandatory, fast, tied to particular neural structures and informationally encapsulated, that is, unaffected by what one believes, as the persistence of the Müller-Lyer illusion shows. The central systems that form beliefs and plan actions are by contrast holistic: anything one knows may turn out to be relevant. Fodor concludes that cognitive science will have little to say about central thinking. When evolutionary psychologists later proposed “massive modularity”, Fodor rejected it in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (2000).
More works by Jerry Fodor
As of November 2026 · Improve this page · How Agora is made