Sixuan (Selena) Han
Professor Jonathan Phillips and Adina Roskies
COGS 1
17 April 2022
How to Integrate Cognitive Penetration Into Fodorian Modularity
Ever since Fodor published his landmark book The Modularity of Mind in 1983, there has been numerous debates about whether the mind consists of modules and to which degree they exist. While evolutionary psychologists argue that the mind is much more modular than Fodor thought, many others have raised doubt about massive modularity or any modularity at all. To grasp and further participate in the debate, one has to understand the idea of information encapsulation, which is one of the defining characteristics of modularity proposed by Fodor. The majority of cognitive scientists would describe information encapsulation as “the mind’s blockade that stops any background knowledge or active thinking from altering processing.” Yet psychologists have found many examples of humans actively changing the way they perceive based on cognitive thinking, which theoretically disprove information encapsulation. In this essay, I would like to defend Fodorian modularity not by denying cognitive penetration, but rather by incorporating it into the region of modularity and perception. I will argue that in cases of cognitive penetration, cognitive penetration and encapsulation happen separately, leaving each other intact.
To start, I would propose a loose definition of information encapsulation. If one traces back to Fodor’s original coinage of the term, they can find that Fodor aimed to describe a restriction posed on the information transferring to “fine-grained perceptual sub-systems” (Clarke, 2063). However, cognitive scientists gradually interpret the term as each perception modularity constituting its own encapsulated module, which in fact dramatizes the extent of segregation. Given this premise, it seems unnecessary to defend strict information encapsulation when it was never even proposed. Instead, the question shifts to whether encapsulation and penetration exist and how they co-exist.
In 2015, Dustin Stokes and Vincent Bergeron officially stated the dilemma around these two key concepts. Their explanations were two-folds: they first present that there are sufficient proofs of both cognitive penetration and information encapsulation, which inherently challenges each other as well as modularity itself. Then, they identified some recent theories that trivialize the importance of information encapsulation. However, Stokes and Bergeron came to the conclusion that these theories could not provide useful insights to the cognitive approaches because they have strayed too far from the core of modularity (335). Luckily, Sam Clarke has put forward new understandings of the dilemma that broke through the bottleneck to a little extent. In his paper, Clarke argued that cognitive penetration and information encapsulation can both happen in one perception process and do not contradict each other, because information encapsulation happens within a module, while cognitive penetration happens between modules. He also hypothesized that the modules have hierarchical orders, so that we may allow the outputs of a module at one level of the hierarchy to be changed by some cognitive process or supplied by the one’s cognitive states, before being used as inputs to modules at higher levels of the hierarchy (2606). Clarke’s hypothesis makes a good point in defending modularity while protecting the integrity of information encapsulation. However, the paper lacks in that it does not illustrate in detail how modules have hierarchy or why cognitive penetration necessarily happens between modules.
Therefore, I propose a modification of Clarke’s theory: cognitive penetration happens outside the modules, while information encapsulation happens within the modules. Figure 1 shows an example of how cognitive penetration influences the way we perceive the rotational direction of the cylinder. If we focus on some of the dots, we perceive a cylinder rotating clockwise; if we focus on others, then the cylinder rotates counterclockwise. We are never able to see both cases at the same time. Similarly, one can actively change their perception of the direction the train goes in Figure 2 by choosing to focus on some of the points in the motion picture, and each time they can only see on interpretation of the direction.
In the lecture about attention, we have learned that when people pay close attention to a few of the cues shown to them, they demonstrate very poor awareness of the rest of the cues. Our visual system sees all the information presented, but somewhere before our cognitive perception, some information does not pass through the bottleneck, resulting in our negligence. Although current studies have a hard time proving where exactly the bottleneck happens, the attention theory helps explain why we can voluntarily choose to, but also mandatorily need to mute the dots that we are not interested in when we look at Figure 1 or the features that suggest the train moves the other direction in Figure 2. In other words, our attention to some extent determines how we perceive motions in the aforementioned cases. Within this understanding, the voluntariness corresponds to cognitive penetration and the mandatoriness corresponds to information encapsulation.
It is clear that once information is encapsulated, the mind cannot break through the barriers and recover the lost perception. In this sense, penetration seems to be a poor word choice to describe the actual effect; Carston used the name “the fixation of belief” (8) in his paper to describe active influence by the will, which is directed by the central system. From my previous illustrations of the two examples, this process takes place before our awareness takes charge of perception, because once the observer has set their mind to perceiving one direction, the perception behaves correspondingly rather than changing randomly. This may suggest that instead of delivering already encapsulated stimuli to domain-general reasoning, the fixation of belief occurs before encapsulation, and that top-down processing (cognitive penetration) gives out commands that precede bottom-up visual feedback (information encapsulation). In this way, both cognitive penetration and information encapsulation are recognized and reserved and some degree of hierarchy in Clarke’s theory remains.
This theory still holds in examples of illusions that we cannot interpret in other ways, such as the Muller-Lyer illusion and the shaded grid illuminance illusion. In both cases, there exist obvious and strong visual cues that suggest one way of interpretation, which are the arrowheads and the shade projected by the cylinder. Our perception system refuses to consider the stimuli as a coincidence, so the fixation of belief does not take part in altering our perception. The rotating cylinder and moving train examples differ from these examples because there is no strong suggestion of one particular direction or to declare one possible answer as causal and the other one as coincidental. This allows freedom for the active mind to interpret the stimuli in different ways.
To conclude, cognitive penetration does not compose a dilemma or act as a counterproof for Fodor’s modularity, nor does it work against information encapsulation. Under the original definition by Fodor, penetration and encapsulation occurs in a linear order, the former functioning outside the modules and the latter inside. Such a coexistence maintains the core of modularity and resolves stalemate in the debate around modularity and therefore proves the integrity of Fodorian modularity. However, we should still be aware of the academia’s lack of knowledge in how information encapsulation interacts with cognitive penetration and in which occasion one might override the other, and that information encapsulation is still just one aspect of Fodorian modularity. Vigorous debate is still crucial to developing our understanding of modularity of the mind.
Bibliography
Carston, Robyn. “The architecture of the mind: modularity and modularization.” Cognitive Science: An Introduction, edited by D. Green, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996.
Clarke, Sam. “Cognitive Penetration and Informational Encapsulation: Have We Been Failing the Module?” Philosophical Studies, vol. 178, no. 8, Springer Netherlands, 2020, pp. 2599–620, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01565-1.
Stokes, Dustin, and Vincent Bergeron. “Modular Architectures and Informational Encapsulation: a Dilemma.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science, vol. 5, no. 3, Springer Netherlands, 2015, pp. 315–38, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-015-0107-z.