Fodor, Aristotle, and the modular mind

I mentioned some time ago, when discussing Daniel Stern’s attempt at tracing meaningful interpersonal interactions, that there is a convenient way to bypass the knotty problem of how representations - or what ”comes in” - obtain meanings that can be expressed by referential, or symbolic, means. You just ignore the divide and concentrate on either side. Because Stern did not want to do this, he crashed into the problem. His effort to solve it demonstrate that a number representational modes must be assumed and, specifically, one that allows for the transition. Stern called it “proto-narrative envelope”. To me, this construction is not entirely convincing.

Disregarding the number and nature of representational modes that make up our experience of the world, the other problem is the number of mental faculties that must be postulated  to account for the incoming information. Stimulated by Ibn Sina’s Medieval account of the five faculties inthe perceptual soul, I left the issue of meaning for a while and began reading Jerry Fodor’s and Peter Carruthers’ views of mind modules. What an interesting world of thought it is. As a psychotherapist being inspired by Lev Vygotsky, Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Donald Winnicott, I left behind the cognitive approaches to the mind in the early 1970s. Hence, the more philosophical discourse on  the computational models of the mind is a foreign territory to me and I have to proceed cautiously.

Both Fodor and Carruthers subscribe to the assumption on multiple functions, or modules, that mediate between the flow of sensory input and the mind. Their main difference seems to be in the level and extent of such modules. Fodor claims that the central (computational) processes are non-modular, while Carruthers supports a “massive modularity” theory of the mind. Both share the view that mental modules are innate, hard-wired systems that operate according to their inner rules.

Interestingly, when Fodor published his seminal book “The modularity of mind” (1983), he added “An essay on faculty psychology” as the subheading. Indeed, within the Aristotelian framework of how the mind relates to the world there is logically no alternative.  Although written almost thirty years ago, Fodor’s book is a relevant work that introduces the modern version of the ancient model of understanding the soul’s operations. Here is an illustration how Fodor approaches the issue of incoming forms:

Any mechanism whose states covary with environmental ones can be thought of as registering information about the world; and, given the satisfaction of certain further conditions, the output of such systems can reasonably be thought of as representations of the environmental states with which they covary … But if cognitive processors are computational systems, they have access to such information solely in virtue of the form of the representations in which it is couched. Computational processes are, by definition, syntactic; a device which makes information available to such processes is therefore responsible for it format as well as its quality… if we think of the perceptual mechanisms as analogous to such devices, then we are saying that what perception must do is to so represent the world as to make it accessible to thought. ” (Fodor: The modularity of mind, pp. 39-40, original italics).

It is not easy to unpack this statement. In fact, the whole book is an elaboration of this basic formulation. For the time being, I only pay attention to the first and the last sentences in the passage. Aristotle’s view of the co-varying mechanism covered the sense organs and the internal common sense, whose joint operation produced phantasmata as the output, in a mode that was accessible to thought. This analogue does not do justice to Fodor because, elsewhere, he explicitly rejects the “resemblance theory” of mental representations. 

True, since Descartes representations could not anymore be conceived of as “forms without matter”. The division between “res extensa” and “res cogitans” implied a radical transformation from the material to the ideal mode of existence. The concept of representation has indeed changed a lot. However, the notion of sensory processes that  covary with external states, register information about the world, and present this information to thought, faithfully repeats the ancient model of the mind.

How do representations gain meaning?

Daniel Stern postulated six internal formats that pick up various aspects of the incoming sense data. Probably not aware of it, Stern repeats Aristotle’s problem of how the pieces from different sensory channels are parsed together. By being so distinct and clear, Stern finds exactly the right words to show the problem. I must repeat the passage from my previous post:

...the diverse events and feelings are tied together as necessary elements of a single unified happening that, at one of its higher levels, assumes a meaning. The problem with this and other such solutions is how the meaning, even a very primitive one, slips in or gets assigned or is constructed from the pieces. (Stern: The motherhood constellation, p. 89, my italics)

Indeed, by what mental function does meaning become attached to the representation, or the internal perceptual form of an object or an event? This is a typically Aristotelian problem, as Kaukua and Kukkonen pointed out in their article. An interesting Medieval attempt to solve it was presented by Ibn Sina (the Latin Avicenna), a Persian physician who lived around the turn of the first millennium (980–1037). He was an important developer of Arabian philosophical psychology and a link in the subsequent Western Medieval adoption of Aristotle’s philosophy.

Much in the same manner as Stern, Ibn Sina recognised the need to postulate a number of internal functions, or internal senses, that processed the elemental data, received by the five sense organs. I managed to retrieve a translated excerpt  in which Ibn Sina enlists the five internal senses that perform various synthetic operations on the incoming forms.

One of the animal internal faculties of perception is the faculty of fantasy, i.e., sensus communis, located in the forepart of the front ventricle of the brain. It receives all the forms which are imprinted on the five [external] senses and transmitted to it from them. Next is the faculty of representation located at the rear part of the front ventricle of the brain, which preserves what the sensus communis has received from the five senses even in the absence of the sensed object. … Next is the faculty of the 'sensitive imagination' in relation to the animal soul, and the 'rational imagination' in relation to the human soul. This faculty is located in the middle ventricle of the brain near the vermiform process, and its function is to combine certain things with others in the faculty of representation, and to separate some things from others as it chooses. Then there is the estimative faculty located in the far end of the middle ventricle of the brain, which perceives the non-sensible intentions that exist in the individual sensible objects, like the faculty that judges that the wolf is to be avoided and the child is to be loved. Next there is the retentive and recollective faculty located in the rear ventricle of the brain, which retains what the estimative faculty perceives of the non-sensible intentions existing in individual sensible objects. (Avicenna, translated in Rahman, F.(1952). Avicenna's psychology. London: Oxford University Press,  p. 31)

Ibn Sina is surprisingly modern by regarding these internal faculties as brain modules. Certainly, current brain imaging studies have shown that these modules  of the “sensible soul” do not reside in the ventricles, but the contemporary modular theories of mind follow exactly the same logic of analysis as Ibn Sina does in the excerpt. Going back to Stern’s question about constructing meaning of events I want you to pay attention to the estimative faculty that is capable of perceiving the non-sensible intentions that exist in sensible objects.

Ibn Sina understood well the impoverished character of the Aristotelian sensible forms. He asked, why does the lamb flee when perceiving a wolf. The grey, hairy form does not “inform” a particular danger. Something had to be added, and here we have a conception of meaning that “exists in the individual sensible objects” and is recognised by the estimative faculty (cf. Stern’s “protonarrative envelope”).  Thus, in addition to forms, objects seem to “emit” intentions that are perceived by an internal mental faculty. Actually, the currently popular research on the “theory-of-mind”, or "mind-reading" module represents a truly Avicennian approach to understanding how we make sense of others. I will return to this topic in due course.

According to Kaukua and Kukkonen, Ibn Sina had a sophisticated understanding of intentions.  He did not, actually, regard them as properties of objects or events that they "emit" and are then sensed by the estimative faculty. Instead, intentions vary according to the reciprocal positioning of the agent an object.  Kaukua and Kukkonen illustrate this by an example of the hunter’s way of perceiving a wolf. While the lamb flees, the hunter has a rifle and this alters the intentional balance. Now it is rather the wolf who must escape. But the hunter may be an environmentalist and does not want to harm the wolf. “Acts of meaning” (in Bruner’s terms) are not anything as such. They receive their meaning only in the concrete relationships that are established between the actor and the object.

Representing interaction

In Chapter 5 of The Motherhood Constellation, Daniel Stern traces the path from mother’s overt behaviour to the infant’s subjective experience, or his way of representing  interpersonal events. Stern is aware of the difficulties ahead: “When thinking about infants, we are far less sure what such representations are and how they get there" (i.e., in the infant’s mind). (p. 79). The first problem is the nature of social interaction. Inanimate events can be described in the standard Aristotelian model of incoming forms:

There are several important differences between the representations of inanimate physical happenings and those of subjective interpersonal happenings. For inanimate physical happenings, the mental events in a representation are thought to be isomorphic with the real events: they are simply performed virtually on an internal stage. (Stern, The motherhood constellation, 1995, p. 80)

Joint interpersonal actions have several features that make this straightforward model inadequate. Stern lists six, which I will not reproduce here. Taken together, they make up a particular format of, or a placeholder for representations that Stern calls “schema-of-being-with-another”. It can be seen as an elaboration of his earlier description of “Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized” or RIGs.  Stern warns of equating representations with the relatively simple idea of internalising interactions and adopts a strictly Kantian position:

...these representations are not formed from external events or persons that have  been internalized. They are not put inside from the outside. They are constructed from the inside, from the self-experience of being with another. Nothing is taken in. (ibid., p. 81)

I admire Stern’s bold precision even if by being so explicit he paints himself into the corner. Now he is faced with the issue by what means does the infant construct the internal representations of interactive events. In a truly Kantian manner Stern has to assume a number of innate "principles of judgment” or schemas that do the job for the infant.

What fundamental formats for representing already exist to account for each of the basic elements of an experience as well as to tie them together? Taking each element separately, we have perceptual schemas (e.g., visual images) and we have conceptual schemas (e.g., symbols and words)... Piaget introduced the sensorimotor schema, which added motor acts and their coordination with sensory experiences as yet another fundamental way of representing experience. More recently, another basic form of human representation available to children has been added, namely, an invariant sequence of events that is represented as a single script...  (ibid., p. 82)

These four representational formats are necessary but not sufficient for the construction of the schema-of-being-with-another. Hence, Stern adds two more. The first is a placeholder for the temporal contour of affects, called “feeling shape” and the second has the intriguing name of a “protonarrative envelope”. It is needed in order to make sense of the five other formats in terms of meaning:

...the diverse events and feelings are tied together as necessary elements of a single unified happening that, at one of its higher levels, assumes a meaning.

The problem with this and other such solutions is how the meaning, even a very primitive one, slips in or gets assigned or is constructed from the pieces. There is a way out of this dilemma, and that is to assume that there is yet another fundamental way of representing human events, a sixth schema made up of “acts of meaning”, as Bruner and others have argued. (Ibid., p. 89)

As Jari Kaukua and Taneli Kukkonen pointed out in their article ”Sense perception and self-awareness” , an Aristotelian model of sense perception unavoidably necessitates an assumption of mental faculties that unite the disparate information conveyed by the senses. “What is it that allows us to go beyond mere sensations of red, fragrant, and smooth and to recognise an apple for an apple?” (Kaukua & Kukkonen, 2007, p. 96). Stern’s list of six representational formats summarises modern conceptions in cognitive developmental psychology, but as a solution to the puzzle it has ancient roots. I will get back to these in my next post.

John Locke's Aristotelian rift

Daniel Stern is certainly not the first to raise the question of how mental representations are expressed. Contemporary philosophers have a convenient way of dealing with Aristotle’s rift between incoming forms and their signification by words. They speak about epistemic and semantic aspects in the mind’s operations. Separating these aspects allows them to bypass the problem how mental representations are transformed into words.

This is not, however, a novel solution. I recognise it as an "analytic jump" in John Locke’s An essay concerning human understanding between the Books II and III. Book II deals with the path from sense operations to the formation of mental ideas:

The soul begins to have ideas when it begins to perceive. To ask, at what time a man has first any ideas, is to ask, when he begins to perceive; - having ideas, and perception, being the same thing. (Locke, Book II, Chapter 1. Of ideas in general and their origin). 

Locke’s analysis of how ideas are generated in Book II soon becomes quite complex. Not all ideas stem from “privative causes”. Bodies have primary qualities, secondary qualities, etc. This complexity does not, however, alter the fact that the analysis begins from sense perception, which is largely understood in an Aristotelian way as a passively receptive process. Then, the very first page in Book III introduces human expression by the following quote:

 Man fitted to form articulate sounds. God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words.

To use these sounds as signs of ideas. Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was further necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions; and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.”

 

Locke dodges the problem of how representational ideas transform into expressive signs by referring to God’s kindness. As modern secular scientists, psychologists cannot solve the problem in this convenient way. Hence, Stern is quite right when he points out in “The motherhood constellation” that the transformation of mental representations into expressions remains an enigma.