Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

In contrast, we suggest that FLN—the computational mechanism of recursion—is recently evolved and unique to our species” (p. 1573).

Similarly (p. 1573), “We propose in this hypothesis that FLN comprises only the core computational mechanisms of recursion as they appear in narrow syntax and the mappings to the interfaces” (i.e. the interfaces with mechanisms of speech perception, speech production, conceptual knowledge, and intentions).

True recursion requires a computational device with a stack of pointers (or an equivalent mechanism) to keep track of where to return after an embedded procedure has been executed.

Tail recursion can be mimicked (at least in input–output behavior or “weak generative capacity”) by a computational device that implements simple iteration, where one instance of a procedure can be completed and forgotten by the time the next instance has begun.

Human languages, unlike invented symbolic systems, must be used in real time and by agents with limitations of knowledge and computational capacity.

Specifically, recursion could have evolved in other animals “to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships,” in a module that was “impenetrable with respect to other systems.

First, my claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks (that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practical limitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant.

This is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so the supposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be illusory.

It combines the key idea of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—that the mind is a computational system—with the key idea of the new evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s—that signs of design in the natural world are products of the natural selection of replicating entities, namely genes.

The first major theme of HTMW is computation, and Fodor, more than anyone, has defended what he calls the computational theory of mind: that thinking is a form of computation.