The increasing number of newborns has stimulated the infant market. In particular, the baby stroller, serving as an important life partner for both babies and parents, has attracted more attention from society. Stroller design and functionality are of vital importance to babies' physiological and psychological health as well as brain development. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a modularization design method for the novel four-wheeled baby stroller based on the KANO model to ensure the mechanical safety and involve more functionalities. (...) Manual control of the baby stroller requires the rapid response of human motor systems in a completely controlled manner, which could be a potential risk. To enhance the safety and stability of the stroller motion, especially in situations where manual control is hard to achieve (e.g., sharp turns), we propose an autonomous motion control scheme based on model predictive control. Both the modularization design and the motion controller are verified in the MATLAB simulation environment through path tracking tasks. The feasibility is validated by the satisfactory experimental results with lateral position error in a reasonable range and good trajectory smoothness. (shrink)

In this paper, I make a case for the modularity of the motor system. I start where many do in discussions of modularity, by considering the extent to which the motor system is cognitively penetrable, i.e., the extent to which its processing and outputs are causally influenced, in a semantically coherent way, by states of central cognition. I present some empirical findings from a range of sensorimotor adaptation studies that strongly suggest that there are limits to such influence (...) under certain conditions. These results cry out for an explanation. In the remainder of the paper, I provide one: The motor system is cognitively penetrable, but nonetheless modular along broadly Fodorian lines, insofar as it is informationally encapsulated. This means that its access is limited to its own proprietary database in computing its function from input to output, which does not include the information stored in central cognition. I then offer a model of action control, from distal intention to action outcomes, that further helps to illustrate this picture and can accommodate the target empirical findings. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus that emotions contribute positively to human practical rationality. While arguments that defend this position often appeal to the modularity of emotion-generation mechanisms, these arguments are also susceptible to the criticism, e.g. by Jones (2006), that emotional modularity supports pessimism about the prospects of emotions contributing positively to practical rationality here and now. This paper aims to respond to this criticism by demonstrating how models of emotion processing can accommodate the sorts of cognitive influence (...) required to make the pro-emotion position plausible whilst exhibiting key elements of modularity. (shrink)

The notion of modularity, introduced by Noam Chomsky and developed with special emphasis on perceptual and linguistic processes by Jerry Fodor in his important book The Modularity of Mind, has provided a significant stimulus to research in cognitive science. This book presents essays in which a diverse group of philosophers, linguists, psycholinguists, and neuroscientists - including both proponents and critics of the modularity hypothesis - address general questions and specific problems related to modularity. Jay L. Garfield (...) is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Communications and Cognitive Science at Hampshire College. (shrink)

Empirically-informed approaches to emotion often construe our emotions as modules: systems hardwired into our brains by evolution and purpose-built to generate certain coordinated patterns of expressive, physiological, behavioural and phenomenological responses. In ‘Against Modularity’ (2008), de Sousa argues that we shouldn’t think of our emotions in terms of a limited number of modules because this conflicts with our aspirations for a life of greater emotional richness. My aim in this paper is to defend de Sousa’s critique of modular emotion (...) taxonomies from some obvious rejoinders, and to develop his positive proposal as to how we might reconcile the evidence for emotional modularity with an attitude of disapproval towards rigid emotion taxonomies. (shrink)

Discussions concerning the modularity of the pain system have been focused on questions regarding the cognitive penetrability of pain mechanisms. It has been claimed that phenomena such as placebo analgesia demonstrate that the pain system is cognitively penetrated; therefore, it is not encapsulated from central cognition. However, important arguments have been formulated which aim to show that cognitive penetrability does not in fact entail a lack of modularity of the pain system. This paper offers an alternative way to (...) reject the modularity of the pain system, which is independent from, but consistent with, the presence of cognitive penetration. It is proposed that, given the current knowledge regarding the functioning and the structure of the pain system, there are good reasons to accept that certain central cognitive mechanisms are part of the pain system. It is argued that such a ‘cognitive constitution’ of the pain system entails that the pain system is not modular. (shrink)

Usually, modular construction involves the off-site manufacturing of standard building components in a factory before the components are assembled on the construction site. It is common to use terms like "prefabrication," "off-site construction," and "modular construction" interchangeably. The construction of modular constructions nowadays is flourishing all over the globe. The roots of the Albanian prefabricated constructions are extended for the first time around the 1970s. This paper will indeed analyze some recently built modular construction in Albania, considering and comparing it (...) with international case studies. The demand for new construction in Albania is rising rapidly. Currently, the most common structures are cast-in-place beam-column designs, driven by both traditional mindsets and industrial capabilities. However, with Albania's economic growth, there is an increasing need for affordable, quickly built, and technologically advanced buildings. Modular construction, which assembles prefabricated modules on-site, offers a solution. This method aligns with bioclimatic design principles, reducing environmental impact and optimizing resources, marking a shift toward sustainability in the construction industry. The purpose of this article is to explore the potential integration of “modular construction techniques” with “bioclimatic design concepts” to create buildings that are environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, and multipurpose by function. This study explores the use of modular construction techniques in conjunction with bioclimatic techniques to increase “building sustainability”. Combining these tactics encourages energy efficiency and a reduced environmental effect, making people far more resilient and weather-adaptable. The synergy between the two of them is necessary. (shrink)

Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a (...) useful framework for directing research and resolving debates about individual cognitive systems and the nature of human evolved cognition. Modularity is a fundamental property of living things at every level of organization; it might prove indispensable for understanding the structure of the mind as well. (shrink)

Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of (...) modules, as it is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation greatly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity. (shrink)

The paper presents an analysis of the current state of administrative modular buildings and co-working spaces in some European countries and Latin America. The study provides an overview of the concept of modular buildings and co-working spaces, including their history and evolution and their energy efficiency. They also examine the benefits and drawbacks of these types of buildings, as well as the factors that contribute to their success. The authors analyze several case studies of administrative modular buildings and co-working spaces (...) in different European countries and Latin America, such as the UK, Germany, Slovakia, and Ukraine ending with Brazil. The paper takes into consideration the design and construction of these buildings, as well as the services and amenities they offer. The paper also considers the impact of administrative modular buildings and co-working spaces on the environment, as well as their potential for promoting sustainable development. The authors discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the development of administrative modular buildings and co-working spaces and provide recommendations for future research in this area. Energy-efficient modular buildings and co-working spaces have the potential to support organizations in achieving their sustainability goals while also providing a range of benefits for employees and stakeholders. (shrink)

Debates about the modularity of cognitive architecture have been ongoing for at least the past three decades, since the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). According to Fodor, modularity is essentially tied to informational encapsulation, and as such is only found in the relatively low-level cognitive systems responsible for perception and language. According to Fodor’s critics in the evolutionary psychology camp, modularity simply reflects the fine-grained functional specialization dictated by natural selection, and (...) it characterizes virtually all aspects of cognitive architecture, including high-level systems for judgment, decision making, and reasoning. Though both of these perspectives on modularity have garnered support, the current state of evidence and argument suggests that a broader skepticism about modularity may be warranted. (shrink)

Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, semantic and pragmatic judgments within a single paradigm. The comparison between these quantitative data (...) leads us to four main results, (i) Our results support a departure from one element of the classical Gricean approach, thus helping to clarify and settle an empirical debate. This first outcome also confirms the soundness of the methodology, as the results align with standard contemporary accounts of scalar implicature (SI), (ii) We confirm that the formal semantic notion of monotonicity underlies negative polarity item (NPI) syntactic acceptability, but (iii) our results indicate that the notion needed is perceived monotonicity. We see results (ii) and (iii) as the main contribution of this study: (ii) provides an empirical interpretation and confirmation of one of the insights of the model-theoretic approach to semantics, while (iii) calls for an incremental, cognitive implementation of the current generalizations, (iv) Finally, our results do not indicate that the relationship between NPI acceptability and monotonicity is mediated by pragmatic features related to Sis: this tells against elegant attempts to unify polarity sensitivity and Sis (pioneered by Krifka and Chierchia). These results illustrate a new methodology for integrating theoretically rigorous work in formal semantics with an experimentally-grounded cognitively-oriented view of linguistic competence. (shrink)

Modular approaches to the architecture of the mind claim that some mental mechanisms, such as sensory input processes, operate in special-purpose subsystems that are functionally independent from the rest of the mind. This assumption of modularity seems to be in tension with recent claims that the mind has a predictive architecture. Predictive approaches propose that both sensory processing and higher-level processing are part of the same Bayesian information-processing hierarchy, with no clear boundary between perception and cognition. Furthermore, it is (...) not clear how any part of the predictive architecture could be functionally independent, given that each level of the hierarchy is influenced by the level above. Both the assumption of continuity across the predictive architecture and the seeming non-isolability of parts of the predictive architecture seem to be at odds with the modular approach. I explore and ultimately reject the predictive approach’s apparent commitments to continuity and non-isolation. I argue that predictive architectures can be modular architectures, and that we should in fact expect predictive architectures to exhibit some form of modularity. (shrink)

The claim that the human cognitive system tends to allocate resources to the processing of available inputs according to their expected relevance is at the basis of relevance theory. The main thesis of this chapter is that this allocation can be achieved without computing expected relevance. When an input meets the input condition of a given modular procedure, it gives this procedure some initial level of activation. Input-activated procedures are in competition for the energy resources that would allow them to (...) follow their full course. What determines which of the procedures in competition get sufficient resources to trigger their full operation is the dynamics of their activation. This dynamics depend both on the prior degree of mobilisation of a modular procedure and on the activation that propagates from other active modules. It is quite conceivable also that the mobilisation of some procedures has inhibitory effects on some others. The relevance-theoretic claim is that, at every instant, this dynamics of activation provides rough physiological indicators of expected relevance. The flow of energy in the system is locally regulated by these indicators. As a result, those input-procedure combinations that have the greatest expected relevance are the more likely ones to receive sufficient energy to follow their course. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of develop- ment: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought (...) to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop internally, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via parameterization. (shrink)

It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure (...) of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the pre-scientific conception of emotion. (shrink)

After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.

Structuralism can be defined as an important concept of using “units” as elements of form and space-giving, where the whole form is made not only up of a “texture”, a certain flexible grid, or an algorithm of shape-giving, but it depends also on the relationships created and how people use it. The hypothesis of this study is that “Modular Construction” can also have an aesthetically pleasing outlook and that modular housing can definitely have increasing importance in the future. Modular housing (...) due to its cheap, and manufactural way of construction can be replicable in various locations. Structuralism and Modular Construction have been at the core of the Modernist movement. Although postmodernism marked the decline of modular construction adopting methods known for a more close sense of place, vernacular, and locality, which differs from the ubiquitous model of modernism, it is the universality of space and habitation seen since the times of Hippodamus Grid, Japanese Tattami systems, and rational universal space in housing known in Europe that make grid and modular design an excellent system in obtaining, rationality, functionality, flexibility, and energy efficiency, including quick construction and possibility for replication. In this regard, modular construction has a future, especially in times of crisis and economic instability. (shrink)

This article evaluates the idea of the modularity of mind and domain specificity. This concept has penetrated the behavioral disciplines, and in the case of some of these—for example, the cognitive study of religion—has even formed their foundation. Although the theoretical debate relating to the idea of modularity is ongoing, this debate has not been reflected in the use of modularity in behavioral research. The idea of domain specificity or modularity of mind is not without its (...) controversies, and there is no consensus regarding its acceptance. Many neuroscientists, as well as several evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, have raised a number of objections that cannot remain overlooked. I will show the areas in which the idea is problematic, what attempts have been made to preserve it, and how social scientific research can move beyond post-Fodorian modularity without losing any valuable insights. (shrink)

It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure (...) of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the pre-scientific conception of emotion. (shrink)

The claim that the human cognitive system tends to allocate resources to the processing of available inputs according to their expected relevance is at the basis of relevance theory. The main thesis of this chapter is that this allocation can be achieved without computing expected relevance. When an input meets the input condition of a given modular procedure, it gives this procedure some initial level of activation. Input-activated procedures are in competition for the energy resources that would allow them to (...) follow their full course. What determines which of the procedures in competition get sufficient resources to trigger their full operation is the dynamics of their activation. This dynamics depend both on the prior degree of mobilisation of a modular procedure and on the activation that propagates from other active modules. It is quite conceivable also that the mobilisation of some procedures has inhibitory effects on some others. The relevance-theoretic claim is that, at every instant, this dynamics of activation provides rough physiological indicators of expected relevance. The flow of energy in the system is locally regulated by these indicators. As a result, those input-procedure combinations that have the greatest expected relevance are the more likely ones to receive sufficient energy to follow their course. (shrink)

This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, ...

We present an argument-based formalism of contract dispute resolution following a modern view that the court would resolve a contract dispute by enforcing an interpretation of contract that reasonably represents the mutual intention of contract parties. Legal doctrines provide principles, rules and guidelines for the court to objectively arrive at such an interpretation. In this paper, we establish the appropriateness of the formalism by applying it to resolve disputes about performance relief with the legal doctrines of impossibility and frustration of (...) purpose in common laws of contract. The formalism is based on modular argumentation, a recently proposed extension of assumption-based argumentation for modelling contract dispute resolution. (shrink)

In this introduction, we give a brief overview of the main concepts of modularity that have been offered in recent literature. After this, we turn to a summary of the papers collected in this volume. Our primary aim is to explain how the modularity of emotion question relates to traditional debates in emotion theory.

The Modularity of Mind proposes an alternative to the or view of cognitive architecture that has dominated several decades of cognitive science. Whereas interactionism stresses the continuity of perceptual and cognitive processes, modularity theory argues for their distinctness. It is argued, in particular, that the apparent plausibility of New Look theorizing derives from the failure to distinguish between the (correct) claim that perceptual processes are inferential and the (dubious) claim that they are unencapsidated, that is, that they are (...) arbitrarily sensitive to the organism's beliefs and desires. In fact, according to modularity theory, perceptual processes are computationally isolated from much of the background knowledge to which cognitive processes have access. The postulation of autonomous, domain-specific psychological mechanisms underlying perceptual integration connects modularity theory with the tradition of faculty psychology, in particular, with the work of Franz Joseph Call. Some of these historical affinities, and some of the relations between faculty psychology and Cartesianism, are discussed in the book. (shrink)

In the present paper I analyse the modularity thesis and, more specifically, the thesis of domain-specificity of processing. I argue that this thesis is not trivial only under the assumption of a variety of processes which differ from each other at the implementation level; otherwise, the variety of cognitive processes can only be explained as emergent on the basic mechanism of associative activation in that it operates on domain-specific representations, which is something that no one would deny. But that (...) assumption is untenable: there are no other processes than associative activation (and inhibition) at the implementation level. Any claim to the contrary is the result of a conceptual confusion between two senses of “associative”: a behavioural one, relative to which there are cognitive processes that exceed the ability to code elementary spatio-temporal contingencies, and one that lies instead at the implementation level. Since the assumption of a plurality of processes at the implementation level is untenable, the only viable interpretation of modularism (as far as domain-specificity is concerned) is a trivial one. By this I do not mean that the thesis is devoid of any content. However, its content is scarcely debatable, and far less thrilling than the debate has suggested so far. (shrink)

We obtain, for the first time, a modular many-valued semantics for combined logics, which is built directly from many-valued semantics for the logics being combined, by means of suitable universal operations over partial non-deterministic logical matrices. Our constructions preserve finite-valuedness in the context of multiple-conclusion logics, whereas, unsurprisingly, it may be lost in the context of single-conclusion logics. Besides illustrating our constructions over a wide range of examples, we also develop concrete applications of our semantic characterizations, namely regarding the semantics (...) of strengthening a given many-valued logic with additional axioms, the study of conditions under which a given logic may be seen as a combination of simpler syntactically defined fragments whose calculi can be obtained independently and put together to form a calculus for the whole logic, and also general conditions for decidability to be preserved by the combination mechanism. (shrink)

The main aim of this work is to relate integrability in QFT with a complete particle interpretation directly to the principle of causal localization, circumventing the standard method of finding sufficiently many conservation laws. Its precise conceptual-mathematical formulation as “modular localization” within the setting of local operator algebras also suggests novel ways of looking at general (non-integrable) QFTs which are not based on quantizing classical field theories.Conformal QFT, which is known to admit no particle interpretation, suggest the presence of a (...) “partial” integrability, referred to as “conformal integrability”. This manifests itself in a “braid-permutation” group structure which contains in particular informations about the anomalous dimensional spectrum. For chiral conformal models this reduces to the braid group as it is represented in Hecke- or Birman-Wenzl-algebras associated to chiral models.Another application of modular localization mentioned in this work is an alternative to the BRST formulation of gauge theories in terms of stringlike vectorpotentials within a Hilbert space setting. (shrink)

Beyond modularityattempts a synthesis of Fodor's anticonstructivist nativism and Piaget's antinativist constructivism. Contra Fodor, I argue that: (1) the study of cognitive development is essential to cognitive science, (2) the module/central processing dichotomy is too rigid, and (3) the mind does not begin with prespecified modules; rather, development involves a gradual process of “modularization.” Contra Piaget, I argue that: (1) development rarely involves stagelike domain-general change and (2) domainspecific predispositions give development a small but significant kickstart by focusing the infant's (...) attention on proprietary inputs. Development does not stop at efficient learning. A fundamental aspect of human development (“representational redescription”) is the hypothesized process by which information that isina cognitive system becomes progressively explicit knowledgetothat system. Development thus involves two complementary processes of progressive modularization and progressive “explicitation.” Empirical findings on the child as linguist, physicist, mathematician, psychologist, and notator are discussed in support of the theoretical framework. Each chapter concentrates first on the initial state of the infant mind/brain and on subsequent domain-specific learning in infancy and early childhood. It then goes on to explore data on older children's problem solving and theory building, with particular focus on evolving cognitive flexibility. Emphasis is placed throughout on the status of representations underlying different capacities and on the multiple levels at which knowledge is stored and accessible. Finally, consideration is given to the need for more formal developmental models, and a comparison is made between representational redescription and connectionist simulations of development. In conclusion, I consider what is special about human cognition by speculating on the status of representations underlying the structure of behavior in other species. (shrink)

The leading hypothesis concerning the “reuse” or “recycling” of neural circuits builds on the assumption that evolution might prefer the redeployment of established circuits over the development of new ones. What conception of cognitive architecture can survive the evidence for this hypothesis? In particular, what sorts of “modules” are compatible with this evidence? I argue that the only likely candidates will, in effect, be the columns which Vernon Mountcastle originally hypothesized some 60 years ago, and which form part of the (...) well-known columnar hypothesis in neuroscience—systems that cannot handle gross cognitive functions as distinct from strictly exiguous subfunctions. This is in stark contrast to the modules postulated by much of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. And yet the fate of this revised notion is unclear. The main issue confronting it is the effect of the neural network context on local function. At some point the effects of context are so strong that the degree of specialization required for modularity is not able to be met. Still, despite indications from neuroimaging that peripheral and central systems deploy shared circuitry, some skills clearly do seem to display modularization and autonomy. This article: provides an in-depth analytical and historical review of the fortunes of modular thinking in cognitive science; offers a systematic calibration of brain regions in terms of degrees of functional specificity and robustness; and suggests another way of accounting for the partially encapsulated character of expertise and other highly practiced skills without having to resort to domain-specific modules. (shrink)

Fodor argues that speech perception is accomplished by a module. Typically, modular processing is taken to be bottom-up processing. Yet there is ubiquitous empirical evidence that speech perception is influenced by top-down processing. Fodor attempts to resolve this conflict by denying that modular processing must be exclusively bottom-up. It is argued, however, that Fodor's attempt to reconcile top-down and modular processing fails, because: (i) it undermines Fodor's own conception of modular processing; and (ii) it cannot account for the contextually varying (...) top-down influences that characterize speech perception. (shrink)

The concept of modularity has loomed large in philosophy of psychology since the early 1980s, following the publication of Fodor’s landmark book The Modularity of Mind (1983). In the decades since the term ‘module’ and its cognates first entered the lexicon of cognitive science, the conceptual and theoretical landscape in this area has changed dramatically. Especially noteworthy in this respect has been the development of evolutionary psychology, whose proponents adopt a less stringent conception of modularity than the (...) one advanced by Fodor, and who argue that the architecture of the mind is more pervasively modular than Fodor claimed. Where Fodor (1983, 2000) draws the line of modularity at the relatively low-level systems underlying perception and language, post-Fodorian theorists such as Sperber (2002) and Carruthers (2006) contend that the mind is modular through and through, up to and including the high-level systems responsible for reasoning, planning, decision making, and the like. The concept of modularity has also figured in recent debates in philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language—further evidence of its utility as a tool for theorizing about mental architecture. (shrink)

To create a programming environment for contract dispute resolution, we propose an extension of assumption-based argumentation into modular assumption-based argumentation in which different modules of argumentation representing different knowledge bases for reasoning about beliefs and facts and for representation and reasoning with the legal doctrines could be built and assembled together. A distinct novel feature of modular argumentation in compare with other modular logic-based systems like Prolog is that it allows references to different semantics in the same module at the (...) same time, a feature critically important for application of argumentation in legal domains like contract dispute resolution where the outcomes of court cases often depend on whether credulous or skeptical modes of reasoning were applied by the contract parties. We apply the new framework to model the doctrines of contract breach and mutual mistake. (shrink)

In this paper, I define tacit knowledge as a kind of causal-explanatory structure, mirroring the derivational structure in the theory that is tacitly known. On this definition, tacit knowledge does not have to be explicitly represented. I then take the notion of a modular theory, and project the idea of modularity to several different levels of description: in particular, to the processing level and the neurophysiological level. The fundamental description of a connectionist network lies at a level between the (...) processing level and the physiological level. At this level, connectionism involves a characteristic departure from modularity, and a correlative absence of syntactic structure. This is linked to the fact that tacit knowledge descriptions of networks are only approximately true. A consequence is that strict causal systematicity in cognitive processes poses a problem for the connectionist programme. (shrink)

Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesise that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Is the massive modularity of mind hypothesis a cogent view about the ontological nature of human mind or is it, rather, an effective/ineffective adaptationist discovery heuristic for generating predictively successful hypotheses about both heretofore unknown psychological traits and unknown properties of already identified psychological traits? Considering the inadequacies of the case (...) in favour of massive modularity as an ontological hypothesis, I suggest approaching and valuing massive modularity as an adaptationist discovery heuristic. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the flexibility problem for massive modularity. It argues that massively modular architectures exhibit flexibility largely as a result of context-sensitive competition between modules for the allocation of cognitive resources. Thus, it is the cognitive system as a whole that exhibits flexibility, rather than any particular subsystem within it.

In a recent paper I established an analogue of the Lindemann–Weierstrass part of Ax–Schanuel for the elliptic modular function. Here I extend this to include its first and second derivatives. A generalization is given that includes exponential and Weierstrass elliptic functions as well.

Participants in the long-running bioethical debate over human germline genetic modification (HGGM) tend to imagine future people abstractly and on the basis of conventionalized characteristics familiar from science fiction, such as intelligence, disease resistance and height. In order to distinguish these from scientifically meaningful terms like “phenotype” and “trait,” this article proposes the term “persemes” to describe the units of difference for hypothetical people. In the HGGM debate, persemes are frequently conceptualized as similar, modular entities, like building blocks to be (...) assembled into genetically modified people. They are discussed as though they each would be chosen individually without affecting other persemes and as though they existed as components within future people rather than being imposed through social context. This modular conceptual framework appears to influence bioethical approaches to HGGM by reinforcing the idea of human capacities as natural primary goods subject to distributive justice and supporting the use of objective list theories of well-being. As a result, assumptions of modularity may limit the ability of stakeholders with other perspectives to present them in the HGGM debate. This article examines the historical trends behind the modular framework for genetically modified people, its likely psychological basis, and its philosophical ramifications. (shrink)

In The Architecture of the Mind, Carruthers proposes a new and detailed explanation for how human cognition could be both flexible and massively modular. The combinatorial nature of our linguistic faculty and our capacity to engage in inner speech are the cornerstones of this new explanation. Despite the ingenuity of this proposal, I argue that Carruthers has failed to explain how a massively modular mind could display the flexibility that is characteristic of human thought.

We provide a logical analysis of private international law, a rather esoteric, but increasingly important, domain of the law. Private international law addresses overlaps and conflicts between legal systems by distributing cases between the authorities of such systems (jurisdiction) and establishing what rules these authorities have to apply to each case (choice of law). A formal model of the resulting interactions between legal systems is proposed based on modular argumentation. It is argued that this model may also be useful for (...) governing the interactions between heterogeneous agents, belonging to different and differently regulated virtual societies, without recourse to a central regulatory agency. The model also provides for multiple interpretations concerning rules of private international law as well as substantive rules of the different legal systems. (shrink)

Ever since Chomsky, language has become the paradigmatic example of an innate capacity. Infants of only a few months old are aware of the phonetic structure of their mother tongue, such as stress-patterns and phonemes. They can already discriminate words from non-words and acquire a feel for the grammatical structure months before they voice their first word. Language reliably develops not only in the face of poor linguistic input, but even without it. In recent years, several scholars have extended this (...) uncontroversial view into the stronger claim that natural language is a human-specific adaptation. As I shall point out, this position is more problematic because of a lack of conceptual clarity over what human-specific cognitive adaptations are, and how they relate to modularity, the notion that mental phenomena arise from several domain-specific cognitive structures. The main aim of this paper is not to discuss whether or not language is an adaptation, but rather, to examine the concept of modularity with respect to
the evolution and development of natural language.
. (shrink)

We show that if M is a strongly minimal large homogeneous structure in a countable similarity type and the pregeometry of M is locally modular but not modular, then the pregeometry is affine over a division ring.

Can emotions be rational or are they necessarily irrational? Are emotions universally shared states? Or are they socio-cultural constructions? Are emotions perceptions of some kind? Since the publication of Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983), a new question about the philosophy of emotions has emerged: are emotions modular? A positive answer to this question would mean, minimally, that emotions are cognitive capacities that can be explained in terms of mental components that are functionally dissociable from other parts of (...) the mind. But depending on the kind of modules that are considered, be they Chomskyan, Fodorian, Darwinian, or some other kind, the answer to this question might well be different. The twelve new essays in this volume address the question of whether emotions, or at least some of them, are, in some sense of the word, modules, and explore how this could potentially influence our understanding of emotional phenomena. (shrink)

In a wide range of fields, the word “modular” is used to describe complex systems that can be decomposed into smaller systems with limited interactions between them. This essay argues that mathematical knowledge can fruitfully be understood as having a modular structure and explores the ways in which modularity in mathematics is epistemically advantageous.

There is an argument that has recently been deployed in favor of thinking that the mind is mostly (or even exclusively) composed of cognitive modules; an argument that draws from some ideas and concepts of evolutionary and of developmental biology. In a nutshell, the argument concludes that a mind that is massively composed of cognitive mechanisms that are cognitively modular (henceforth, c-modular) is more evolvable than a mind that is not c-modular (or that is scarcely c-modular), since a cognitive mechanism (...) that is c-modular is likely to be biologically modular (henceforth, b-modular), and b-modular characters are more evolvable (e.g., Sperber 2002, Carruthers 2005). In evolutionary biology, the evolvability of a character in an organism is understood as the “organism’s capacity to facilitate the generation of non-lethal selectable phenotypic variation from random mutation” with respect to that character. Here I will argue that the notion of cognitive modularity needed to make this argument plausible will have to be understood in terms of the biological notion of variational independence; that is, it will have to be understood in such a way that a cognitive feature is c-modular only if few or no other morphological changes (cognitive and not) are significantly correlated with variations of that feature arising in members of the relevant population. I will also argue that all –except for (possibly) one—of the connotations contained in a cluster of notions of cognitive modularity widely accepted in some of the mainstream currents of thought in classical cognitive science, are simply irrelevant to the argument. In order to argue for this, I will have to examine the question as to whether there are any strong theoretical connections between (1) those connotations and (2) notions of modularity accepted in biology, specially in evolutionary and in developmental biology, that are thought to be most relevant to arguments to the effect that biological modularity enhances evolvability. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the modularity of harmonic expectations that are based on cultural schemata despite the availability of more predictive veridical information. Participants were presented with prime–target chord pairs and made an intonation judgment about each target. Schematic expectation was manipulated by the combination of prime and target, with some transitions being schematically more probable than others. Veridical information in the form of prime–target previews, local transition probabilities, or valid versus invalid previews was also provided. Processing was facilitated when (...) a schematically probable target chord followed the prime. Furthermore, this effect was independent of all manipulations of veridical expectation. A solution to L. B. Meyer's (1967b) query "On Rehearing Music" is suggested, in which schematic knowledge contributes to harmonic expectation in a modular manner regardless of whether any veridical knowledge exists. (shrink)