학술논문

The Contribution of Domain Specificity in the Highly Modular Mind.
Document Type
Article
Source
Minds & Machines. Feb2010, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p19-27. 9p. 1 Chart.
Subject
*DOMAIN specificity
*BRAIN
*CONSTRAINTS (Linguistics)
*SURVEYS
*HUMAN information processing
Language
ISSN
0924-6495
Abstract
Is there a notion of domain specificity which affords genuine insight in the context of the highly modular mind, i.e. a mind which has not only input modules, but also central ‘conceptual’ modules? Our answer to this question is no. The main argument is simple enough: we lay out some constraints that a theoretically useful notion of domain specificity, in the context of the highly modular mind, would need to meet. We then survey a host of accounts of what domain specificity is, based on the intuitive idea that a domain specific mechanism is restricted in the kind of information that it processes, and show that each fails at least one of those constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]