ABSTRACT
After one sets out cognitive architecture and analyzes patterns of mental activity and experience algorithmically in terms of that architecture, one is still left with a question—why are things like this? Why, for example, is the lexicon structured the way it is? Why do we have focused attention in some cases and defocused attention in others? Why did most of us develop constraints on remote associations? Why are there these emotion prototypes and not others? Questions such as these lead us to a different sort of explanation. They lead us from explanation in terms of current cognitive or neurocognitive structures and processes to explanation in terms of origins, of history. Specifically, they lead us to evolution. Within the general field of evolution, one form has been particularly influential among cognitivists, evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is, as the name suggests, an extension of evolutionary biology to psychology. However, it is not merely a generic term for any evolutionary work that treats the human mind. As developed by theorists such as John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and extended by writers such as Steven Pinker, it involves specific and controversial doctrines. It is related to sociobiology and shares some of its basic premises—and, in my view, many of its problems.
