John Zerilli (University of Otago)
Evidence of the pervasiveness of neural reuse in the human brain has forced a revision of the standard conception of modularity in the cognitive sciences. One persistent line of argument against such revision, however, draws from a large body of experimental literature attesting to the existence of cognitive dissociations. While numerous rejoinders to this argument have been offered over the years, few have grappled seriously with the phenomenon. This paper offers a fresh perspective. It takes the dissociations seriously, on the one hand, while affirming that traditional modularities of mind do not do justice to the evidence of neural reuse, on the other. The key to the puzzle is neural redundancy. The paper offers both a philosophical analysis of the relation between reuse and redundancy, as well as a solution to the problem of dissociations.
