mend this book for its in-depth coverage of contemporary debates on the nat-ure and even viability of the semantics ⁄pragmatics distinction.3 Any readercurious about these debates will receive a crash course on the rationalesand drawbacks of a wide range of positions, as well as an energetic defense of

contextualism.

kent bach

San Francisco State University

Reconstructing Reason and Representation. murray clarke. Cambridge,Massachusetts, and London, England: The MIT Press, A Bradford Book, 2004.Pp. x, 181.

Evolutionary psychology proposes the following narrative: During the Pleisto-cene, our hunter-gatherer forebears faced many survival and reproductive chal-

lenges. At some point, a genetic event produced in some of our ancestors amental module (a computational processor or mechanism) for effectively meet-ing one of those challenges. As a result, moduled hunter-gatherers gained a

reproductive advantage over their module-less contemporaries, and so overnumerous generations, the module became prevalent among our ancestors. Asimilar sequence occurred thousands of times to produce in our ancestors thou-sands of innate, domain-specific modules. Evolution has bequeathed to us mas-

sively modular minds (e.g., Barkow, and Tooby, 1992).Murray Clarke’s Reconstructing Reason and Representation defends the mas-

sive modularity hypothesis against some well-known criticisms (chapters 1 and

2), offers a partial solution to the disjunction problem (chapter 3), and articu-lates a complex package of views about epistemology (chapters 4-6). Clarke’sbrisk pace and intriguing proposals make this book entertaining and thought-

provoking but leave some crucial arguments and proposals frustratingly under-developed.

Clarke follows convention in his defense of massive modularity by appealing

to the finding that the quality of people’s reasoning using conditionals dependson the content of those conditionals (Cosmides, 1989). Consider these two con-ditional rules (92):

(a) If a person has a ‘D’ rating, then his documents must be markedcode ‘3’.

(b) If a person is drinking beer, then he must be over 20 years old.

Despite appearing to have the same logical structure, people find it easier toreason correctly about (b) than (a). What explains this ‘‘content effect’’? Onehypothesis is that humans have a ‘‘cheater detection module’’ that is activated

whenever a subject recognizes a social exchange situation (Gigerenzer and Hug,

3 Space limitations have precluded delineating all the twists and turns of Recanati’s

intricate dialectic. For that see the review article by Robert M. Harnish in Pragmat-

ics and Cognition 13 (2005): 383–399.

492 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

1992). In the example above, (b) sets off our cheater detection modules (so weknow to check the beer drinker’s age and the minor’s drink) but (a) does not.

Richard Samuels (1998) has criticized this sort of case for modularity byarguing that the content effects can be explained by positing a domain general

reasoning mechanism operating on domain specific (and perhaps innate) bodiesof information (see also Buller, 2005; Carey and Spelke, 1994; Fodor, 2000).Clarke grants Samuels’s point, but argues that it is compatible with massive

modularity. Clarke argues that massive modularity holds that the mind is dom-inated—not necessarily exhausted—by domain-specific processors; and so whileSamuels might be right about cheater detection, the mind is still dominated by

domain-specific processors (7, 36, 28-29, 138-140). Clarke’s reply seems to missthe logic of Samuels’s argument: the evidence proposed by evolutionarypsychology doesn’t give us any reason to believe the mind is dominated by

domain-specific modules rather than domain-general processors operating ondomain-specific knowledge.

Clarke also grapples with Fodor’s ‘‘input objection’’ (2000): How do partic-ular reasoning problems get assigned to one particular module rather than

another? Either the assignment is done by a domain-general mechanism or by adomain-specific one. If the former, then domain-general mechanisms must playa dominant role in cognition; if the latter, then the same problem arises again

(i.e., how do problems get assigned to that processor?). Clarke replies to theinput objection by proposing a third option—problems get assigned to modulesautomatically, without any thinking at all. ‘‘If there is a cheater detection mod-

ule, then thought, conscious or not, is not required [to trigger it], because themodule is triggered automatically by the contextual cues in the environment’’(25). Clarke’s discussion does not moderate this proposal’s initial implausibility.If you woke up tomorrow surprised to find yourself surrounded by parked cars,

it would surely take some thought to determine you were in a used car lot withall its attendant potential for being cheated as opposed to (say) a parking lot.

In chapter 3, Clarke attempts to parlay massive modularity into a partial

solution of the disjunction problem. Suppose tokens of mental state-type ‘R’almost always occur whenever ostriches are present but very occasionally occurwhen emus are present. If ‘R’ represents ostriches, then tokens of ‘R’ in the

presence of emus are cases of misrepresentation. But if ‘R’ represents all andonly those objects (i.e., some-ostriches-or-some-emus) that tend to elicit tokensof ‘R’, then tokens of ‘R’ could never misrepresent. The disjunction problem is

simply this: By virtue of what fact do tokens of ‘R’ misrepresent? Clarke’s solu-tion appeals to the difference between a module’s proper domain (the environ-ment in which evolution selected that module) and the module’s actual domain(the environment in which that module currently operates). For example, when

beavers detect predators, they sometimes slap the water with their tails. Let’sassume beaver slaps are subserved by a cognitive module. Since beavers livingin Disney World don’t have any natural predators, when their cognitive mod-

ules signal ‘danger’, they are misrepresenting the environment. But this is theresult of the module working properly in an environment unlike the one forwhich the module was adapted (60-61). ‘‘Misrepresentation or error ain’t in the

head’’ (60). It is the result of a gap between the module’s proper domain andits actual domain. (This solution is partial, since ‘‘to the extent that part of themind is likely to be nonmodular, a different analysis will be required to handlesuch cases’’ (58).)

CRITICAL NOTICES 493

Clarke’s gap theory seems to imply that a module cannot misrepresent in itsproper domain, since there is no gap between the module’s proper and actualdomains. But Clarke rejects the implication: ‘‘Of course, I do not intend to sug-gest that no errors occurred in the [proper domain]; the Pleistocene were not

perfect’’ (60). Clarke explains:

There is no domain that is, noncontextually, the proper domain... So, for

instance, the Pleistocene period is a proper domain relative to our (current)

actual domain. But, the Pleistocene period was also an actual domain relative

to the Miocene proper domain. To think otherwise is to suppose that natural

selection first occurred during the Pleistocene period (65).

This suggests that misrepresentation occurs in the Pleistocene because the Pleis-tocene proper domain had a prior Miocene proper domain. But this isconfused. Proper domains are defined relative to particular modules: A module’s

proper domain is the environment in which evolution selected that module. Soif a module was selected for during some period in the Pleistocene, then by def-inition that was its proper domain. There might have been other modules ourPleistocene ancestors possessed (and that we might retain) whose proper

domain preceded the Pleistocene—and so the gap theory could explain theirmisrepresenting in the Pleistocene. It’s also possible that a particular module’sproper domain spanned more than one geological epoch. But none of this

shows how Clarke’s gap theory can explain a module misrepresenting in itsproper domain.

I cannot do justice to all the epistemological views Clarke defends in chap-

ters 4-6. So I will focus briefly on two noteworthy items. First, Clarke identifiesa great advantage of pairing reliabilism with evolutionary psychology: It prom-ises a smooth solution to the generality problem, the problem of finding, for

any particular belief, some principled way to identify the mental process whosereliability fixes its justificatory status. Clarke argues (roughly) that an empiricalbelief is knowledge if it is a true belief produced by a reliable, innate, Darwin-ian module (64). And second, Clarke argues that knowledge is a natural kind

(133-136). Clarke’s basic argument is that knowledge must be a natural kindbecause (a) knowledge exists, and (b) knowledge is not culturally relative, andso it is not a ‘‘conceptual kind.’’ Clarke defends the assumption that these three

alternatives (i.e., natural kind, conceptual kind or does not exist) exhaust thepossibilities: If one claims knowledge is something else, ‘‘I begin to lose my gripon what is being talked about. Call this the ‘mystery’ notion of knowledge’’

(135). But why not allow for the possibility that what we call ‘knowledge’ is amishmash of states that do not form a coherent type? Clarke flirts with thispossibility when he argues that ‘‘there is no univocal natural kind that isknowledge’’ (145). Clarke defends this ‘‘fragmentation’’ hypothesis on the

grounds that each cognitive module has its own causal history, and naturalkinds are defined (in part) in terms of the causal laws that are responsible fortheir unity. But rather than conclude that knowledge is a hodgepodge, Clarke

argues that knowledge is actually ‘‘a set of natural kinds’’ (128, 146). This viewis underdeveloped. Massive modularity implies that knowledge acquisition willoften involve the cooperation of many different modules. One might first come

to know something via testimony (involving short term memory, various lan-guage processors, and processors of social information), and then that knowl-edge might be supplemented by experience (again involving many different

494 PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

modules), and may now be maintained by long term memory. For Clarke, hasthis knowledge been an instance of a single kind or multiple changing kinds? Ifone, how can that be? If many, how many? And what is the explanatory payoffof such assiduous taxonomizing? Clarke does not address these questions.

Evolutionary psychology has triggered intense debate. I doubt that MurrayClarke’s Reconstructing Reason and Representation will persuade skeptics orfence-sitters. But for those already positively disposed, this book will suggest

some paths of philosophical exploration that are thought-provoking if not alwayswell lit.

michael bishop

Florida State University

Bibliography

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lutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford:

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Buller, D. 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the

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Carey, S. and E. Spelke 1994. Domains-Specific Knowledge and Con-

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Cosmides, L. 1989. The Logic of Social Exchange: Has Natural Selec-

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