Episode 225: Forbidden Modules

David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion – that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didn’t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.

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Links:

• The University of Austin (UATX)
• Modularity of Mind (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Pietraszewski, David, and Annie E. Wertz. "Why evolutionary psychology should abandon modularity." Perspectives on Psychological Science (2021).
• Break Music: I Am Blue by peez [soundcloud.com]