This sort of outlook fits well into Fodor's driving point regarding psychology: human behaviors can be understood as valid arguments relating intentional states of mind. In physics, when observable phenomena disagree with our understanding of the rules governing the physical world, it is not assumed that some other mystical force is at work -- merely that our observations or concepts concerning physics must somehow be mistaken in that specific situation. Furthermore, it is not assumed that we cannot know what caused the disparity between prediction and observation -- merely that it requires further inquiry. Similarly, Fodor does not assert that the workings of the mind cannot be understood because we may be unable to directly observe them, nor does he contend that something nonphysical is at work when disagreements occur. Fodor's physicalism approaches the mind from the perspective that the mind is a complex physical system, and that mental states must, accordingly, be physical properties of an individual's mind.
The most obvious difficulty with this sort of approach to the mind is that the relationship between the physical world and an equally physical interpretation of it in the mind is not altogether apparent. If reality is the complete sum of physical objects, it is hard to imagine how a physical mind could be capable of possessing an infinite number of physical bits of information and also rely upon rational thought processes (Cain, 16). Much of Fodor's philosophy can be seen as a response to this age-old dilemma. He seeks to deliberately place folk psychology within his overall physicalist framework in order to justify the former and provide a guide to how a better functioning form of cognitive science might be approached. Since he embraces both physicalism and folk psychology, Fodor is faced with the task of explaining why our subliminal understandings of psychology should be accurate within the physical world. Problems arise with this model of the mind when modularity is reconciled with causal reference. Fodor brings these two notions together as a result of his competing psychological and philosophical pulls, but the consequences are somewhat dubious.
Despite his firm belief in commonsense psychology, Fodor takes a drastic step out of it when he issues his support for modularity within Modularity of the Mind. He writes, "Behavior is organized, but the organization of behavior is merely derivative; the structure of behavior stands to mental structure as an effect stands to its cause." (Fodor 1983, 2). With this statement he illustrates his affiliation with folk psychology in that he draws a connection between observable behavior and perceived mental causes of that behavior. However, his reverence for physicalism means that his next question demands a sufficient answer: "But whereof does the structure of the mind consist?" (Fodor 1983, 2). Because of this question, Fodor is forced to engage in a discussion regarding the possible architectures that could make up the human mind. He regards the mind as not a single entity that tallies and organizes information throughout its structure, but as one composed of different systems that are related but discrete. Superficially -- from the folk psychology perspective -- the mind may seem to act as a single system, but Fodor cannot embrace this notion because the mind must be bounded.
In general, "There are two dimensions along which distinct modularity theses may differ. First, they may differ with respect to the account of the nature of mental modules that they incorporate.... Second, they may differ with respect to their account of the number and identity of the mental modules in the human mind." (Cain, 184). In other words, advocates of modularity in the human mind routinely disagree over specifically what a module is, and how many of them occur in the mind. Accordingly, it is essential to place Fodor somewhere within this spectrum: he believes that modules are entirely specific to the tasks they perform, and that the human mind holds at least six of them. But in order to keep his conception of folk psychology sound, he also recognizes that many of the observable human behaviors come from a functioning of the mind that is not modular: "High-level perception and cognitive systems are non-modular on Fodor's theory." (Prinz 2005). Nevertheless, Fodor justifies modularity in such a way that it can be applied to more extreme versions of the theory.
Modularity -- to most philosophers of the mind -- is a more strict and controversial extension of functional decomposition. This is the idea that the mind contains systems...
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