The Phenomenology of Fodor or the Modularity of Merleau-Ponty

The Phenomenology of Fodor or the Modularity of Merleau-Ponty

ABSTRACT: In 1983, Fodor’s Modularity of Mind popularized faculty psychology. His theory employs a trichotomous functional architecture to explain cognitive processes, which is very similar to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. Each theory postulates that perception 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 empirical matter. However, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s 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-Ponty’s phenomenology is a more accurate depiction of human cognitive processes.

Introduction (1)

Fodor’s modularity thesis popularized faculty approaches to cognitive psychology. This theory bears a striking 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 processing 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 impenetrability of information in modules, modules could both be somewhat encapsulated and maintain a general independence from consciousness. Then only the degree of perception’s independance from consciousness would distinguish his theory from Merleau-Ponty’s. 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 Fodor's original claim.

The Two Theories and Their Resemblance

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 amount 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).