Quinean social skills: empirical evidence from eye-gaze against information encapsulation

Abstract

Since social skills are highly significant to the evolutionary success of humans, we should expect these skills to be efficient and reliable. For many Evolutionary Psychologists efficiency entails encapsulation: the only way to get an efficient system is via information encapsulation. But encapsulation reduces reliability in opaque epistemic domains. And the social domain is darkly opaque: people lie and cheat, and deliberately hide their intentions and deceptions. Modest modularity [Currie and Sterelny (2000) Philos Q 50:145-160] attempts to combine efficiency and reliability. Reliability is obtained by placing social skills in unencapsulated central cognition; efficiency by having the social system sensitive to encapsulated socially tagged cues. In this paper, I argue that this approach fails. I focus on eye-gaze as a plausible example of a socially significant encapsulated cue. I demonstrate contra modest modularity that eye-gaze is subject to influence from central cognition.

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

“…As well as criticism and revision of the conceptions of modularity offered by Fodor and by more extreme evolutionary psychologists (Cam 1988;Coltheart 1999;Parsell 2005), Fodor's nativism also received sustained criticism, notably in Fiona Cowie's What's Within: nativism reconsidered (1998;Sterelny 1989). With specific regard to the putative theory of mind or social cognition module, critical responses ranged from the proposal of alternative, more modest forms of modularity (Currie and Sterelny 2000) to more thoroughgoing rejection (Gerrans 2002a;Stone and Gerrans 2006;Gerrans and Stone 2008;Parsell 2009). This literature on the theory of mind module drew in detail on developmental psychology and psychopathology, with particular attention paid to theory of mind in autism, deafness, and Williams syndrome (Gerrans 1998(Gerrans , 2003aGarfield, Peterson, and Perry 2001;Parsell 2010).…”

Williams Syndrome: Dissociation and Mental Structure

“…The most commonly cited sounds were fireworks, 3 Of course, even extreme modularists accept there is interaction between modules, but the interaction must remain shallow. Although I do not have time to rehearse the argument in detail, I have previously argued that modules are characterised by information encapsulation (see Parsell 2009; also see Fodor 1983, especially p. 122). Critically, encapsulation entails that any processing within a module is unavailable to the rest of the mind.…”