Abstract :
The ‘argument from design’ plays a pivotal role in Carruthers’ recent defence of the
massive modularity thesis. However, as this paper seeks to show, there are major flaws in
its structure. If construed deductively, it is unsound: modular mental architecture is not
necessarily the best architecture, and even if it were, this alone would not show that this
architecture evolved. If construed inductively, it is not much more convincing, as it then
appears to be too weak to support the kind of modularity Carruthers is concerned with.
The upshot of this is that whatever reason we might have for believing that the mind is
massively modular, it is not based on the argument from design.
