The Phenomenology of Fodor or the Modularity of Merleau-Ponty :: Psychology Psychological Papers

The Phenomenology of Fodor or the Modularity of Merleau-PontyABSTRACT In 1983, Fodors Modularity of Mind popularized faculty psychology. His theory employs a trichotomous functional computer architecture to explain cognitive processes, which is very similar to Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of acquisition. Each theory postulates that sensing is a mid-level procedure that operates on transduced information and that perception is independent of our cognitive experience. The two theories differ on whether perception is informationally impenetrable. This difference is essentially an empiric matter. However, I suggest that Merleau-Pontys allowance of cross-modal communication within perception explains our ability to identify features in noisy backgrounds better because his theory offers a more definitive ontology that matches human substantive behavior. Likewise, evidence within cognitive science suggests that Merleau-Pontys phenomenology is a more accurate depiction of human cognitive processes. Introduction (1)Fodors modularity thesis popularized faculty approaches to cognitive psychology. This theory bears a great resemblance to the phenomenological theory that Merleau-Ponty proposed two decades earlier. Both theories employ a trichotomous functional architecture to explain cognition and view perception as a mid-level affect of information that lies between the world and consciousness. The key feature that differentiates the views is whether that middle level of processing is completely impenetrable by consciousness. If Fodor was to relax his strong position of the imperviousness of information in modules, modules could both be somewhat encapsulated and maintain a general independence from consciousness. Then only the degree of perceptions independance from consciousness would distinguish his theory from Merleau-Pontys. Currently, both theories can account for the substantive, outward, behavior of humans. Only the procedural behavior, the internal process, differentiates the theories. The conundrum of deciding between the theories is resolvable by an empirical critical experiment. While this will require more knowledge of cognitive psychology, current evidence suggests that Merleau-Ponty was correct and the mind is less encapsulated than Fodors original claim.The Two Theories and Their relation Merleau-Ponty distinguishes three aspects of the psychological process basic sensations, perception, and the associations of memory (Merleau-Ponty, 1994). Basic sensations receive raw information from the world and transduce them for our perceptual processes. Perception unifies the infinite issue forth of information about our environment, from our environment, into a meaningful structure. Perception is interpretive, but its presentation of the world is as distal and objective. There are three central features of perception for Merleau-Ponty. First, perception is synthesized independently by the body and not by the mind (consciousness).