Fodor, Rutgers, and Modularity
In reading an obituary in the New York Times recently, I became acquainted with the work of Jerry A. Fodor who passed away at age 82. He taught at Rutgers, my professional home, so he seemed close, especially because he wrote about the human mind, one of my main professional interests.
As a philosopher of psychology, he advanced the idea of modularity of the mind, that is, cognitive abilities, of which have a countless number. (He wrote the book, “The Modularity of Mind.”) Each of our abilities he stated is the result of compartmentalization. Rather than our brain being one global system, it’s comprised of subsystems, one for language, one for music, one for math, and so forth. Thus the modular mind.
I would take issue with this model. Yes, some things appear to be modular, like our vision and the specific parts of the brain that make seeing happen or the amygdala which is the seat of fear. But other abilities seem global in nature. Although the hippocampus is implicated as being responsible for short-term memory, it is now believed that long-term memory uses the whole brain and pieces of a memory use multiple parts of the brain. Remembering brings these various parts together. Perhaps consciousness is another global user of the brain. So, in my opinion, the brain houses specific modules, as Fodor suggests, but other abilities use most of the whole brain. The brain is a mixture, depending on the ability.
Another part of Fodor’s work concentrated on another and fascinating aspect of human nature, what is innate and what is learned. And thus we come to the subject of language, one of brain researcher's favorite subjects.
Some experts have claimed language is not a learned ability but inborn, or we would say today, hard-wired (Chomsky for one). But I suggest this is wrong. Why do I believe this: wild children.
Over the past number of years, heart-breaking stories of children have been found, in different parts of the world, who grew up having essentially no human contact. They were dealt the worst hand; they were lost, kidnapped and let loose in the wild, abandoned by their parents at a tender age. Some of these children have been discovered living with monkeys, wolves, and dogs. They survived by mimicking how these animals did to survive. It’s hard for me to think of these horrendous conditions for 4 and 5-year olds souls and not want to cry. Typically they have been found aged 7 to 10 after living in the wild for several years. What these different children had in common was the lack of language. We would call them mute. They could make sounds, but no language. Which leads to the obvious conclusion that language is indeed learned. It develops within social settings and is learned among the many things we learn from family and friends and society in general to become humans.