The Contribution of Domain Specificity in the Highly Modular Mind

• DOI: 10.1007/s11023-010-9183-1
• Publication Date: 2010-02-12T17:24:19Z
• Authors: Axel Arturo Barce...; Ángeles Eraña; Robert Stainton
• Keywords: Argument (complex analysis); Theory of computation; Domain specificity

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.