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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2008 59(2):121-141; doi:10.1093/bjps/axm038
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of British Society for the Philosophy of Science. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Generous or Parsimonious Cognitive Architecture? Cognitive Neuroscience and Theory of Mind

Philip Gerrans and Valerie E. Stone

Department of Philosophy, University of Adelaide, philip.gerrans{at}adelaide.edu.au
Department of Psychology, University of Queensland, vstone{at}psy.uq.edu.au


  Abstract

Recent work in cognitive neuroscience on the child's Theory of Mind (ToM) has pursued the idea that the ability to metarepresent mental states depends on a domain-specific cognitive subystem implemented in specific neural circuitry: a Theory of Mind Module. We argue that the interaction of several domain-general mechanisms and lower-level domain-specific mechanisms accounts for the flexibility and sophistication of behavior, which has been taken to be evidence for a domain-specific ToM module. This finding is of more general interest since it suggests a parsimonious cognitive architecture can account for apparent domain specificity. We argue for such an architecture in two stages. First, on conceptual grounds, contrasting the case of language with ToM, and second, by showing that recent evidence in the form of fMRI and lesion studies supports the more parsimonious hypothesis.

  1. Theory of Mind, Metarepresentation, and Modularity
  2. Developmental Components of ToM
  3. The Analogy with Modularity of Language
  4. Dissociations without Modules
  5. The Evidence from Neuroscience
  6. Conclusion


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