Reply to Hogenson (JAP, 48, 1, January 2003)

George Hogenson generously responds to a number of criticisms I raised regarding his original contribution (Hogenson 2002). While he endorses a non-tabula rasa model of the mind, he leaves out a priori features when discussing higher level mentations. In some instances this might be called a ‘near blank slate’, in other instances a ‘rewritable slate’, model of the mind. This is a striking position given that archetypes have also been known as dominants of the unconscious. Hogenson, as best as I can tell, views archetypes as strictly emergent. This is problematic on two accounts: first, it ignores the issues of from what they emerge, and the effect that those antecedents have; and second, it fails to distinguish between the archetypes themselves and archetypal manifestations, a distinction which Jung belabored.

Hogenson persists in a straw-man attack on evolutionary psychology around the issue of modularity. Evolutionary psychology, using the logic of evolution, categorically claims that complex mental competence must be based on simpler antecedents, concluding that all mental ability is based on modularity. Evolutionary psychology neither requires that mentation is solely modular nor that modules are always and only internal representations of the world. Hogenson repeatedly attempts to dismiss evolutionary psychology on a technicality as seen in his treatment of trends in robotics. Rodney Brooks’ own words make clear Brooks’ real assertion:

Rather than modularize perception, world modeling, planning and execution, the new approach builds intelligent control systems where many individual modules each directly generate some part of the behavior of the robot.

Evolutionary psychology simply claims that all mental abilities are exposed to selective pressures, and that the particular features of these abilities influence the whole spectrum of psychological phenomena. While disputes about modularity exist (see Fodor 1998), the wholesale rejection of modu