 By Fodor’s lights, the upshot of this argument—namely, the nonmodular character of central systems—is bad news for the scientific study of higher cognitive functions. This is neatly expressed by his “First Law of the Non-Existence of Cognitive Science,” according to which “[t]he more global (e.g., the more isotropic) a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it” (Fodor, 1983, p. 107). His grounds for pessimism on this score are twofold. First, global systems are unlikely to be associated with local brain architecture, thereby rendering them unpromising objects of neuroscientific study: