Small Navigation Menu

Primary Menu

Evolutionary Psychology and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis

Citation: Samuels, Richard (1998) Evolutionary Psychology and the Massive Modularity Hypothesis.

In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves ‘central processing’ —is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or ‘modules’. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main arguments that evolutionary psychologists have offered for this general architectural thesis fail to provide us with any reason to prefer it to a competing picture of the mind which I call the Library Model of Cognition. Second, I argue that this alternative model is compatible with the central theoretical and methodological commitments of evolutionary psychology. Thus I argue that, at present, the endorsement of the Massive Modularity Hypothesis by evolutionary psychologists is both unwarranted and unmotivated.Article

Additional Information: Citation: The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1998) 49: 575-602.
Creators: Samuels, Richard and
Subjects: Philosophy
Keywords: Evolutionary psychology, Massive modularity hypothesis
Divisions: Institute of Philosophy
Collections: London Philosophy Papers
Dates:
  • 1998 (published)
Comments and Suggestions:
Description/Provenance: Submitted by Mark McBride (mark.mcbride@sas.ac.uk) on 2008-02-10T10:24:04Z No. of bitstreams: 1 R_Samuels_Evolutionary.pdf: 1450830 bytes, checksum: b59e553377e4023536ea8c1b36287cc5 (MD5); Description/Provenance: Made available in DSpace on 2008-02-10T10:24:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 R_Samuels_Evolutionary.pdf: 1450830 bytes, checksum: b59e553377e4023536ea8c1b36287cc5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1998. Date accessioned: 2008-02-10T10:24:04Z; Date available: 2008-02-10T10:24:04Z; Date issued: 1998.

Statistics

View details