Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

For example, he suggests in another place that ‘we will all have to give up on the Turing story as a general account of how the mind works, and hence, a fortiori, that we will have to give up on the generality of the [synthesis of computation and evolution in HTMW ]’ (pp. 46–47).

He does bring up the weaker idea that ‘the mind is Turingequivalent’ (p. 105, note 3; see also p. 33), and that ‘minds are ‘‘input-output equivalent’’ to Turing machines’ (p. 30).

But no one would actually defend this version of the Computational Theory of Mind either.

And with the possible exception of Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ and other representations of the semantically relevant information in syntax, computational models of the human mind rarely posit ‘mental representations that are much like sentences’.

I will assume that the arguments Fodor has in mind come from Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (Turing, 1950) and Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (Quine, 1960).

This leads to his repeated emphasis on how myopic and inflexible computational systems are, an emphasis that, we shall see, he compares unfavorably to the human mind.

Just as curiously, Fodor says nothing about the computational architectures that have been proposed as actual models of the mind.

Yet they do not work like Turing Machines or the variants that Fodor presents as the essence of the computational theory of mind, and Fodor does not refer to them in his discussion.

Frustratingly, Fodor never gives a clear definition of what he means by abduction, nor does he work through an example that lays bare exactly how a computational system (Turing machine or other) fails to do something that humans easily do. He often seems to use ‘abduction’ and its relatives to embrace any really hard problem about cognition, as if the real title of the book was We Don’t Understand Everything About the Mind Yet. But Fodor’s general idea is that when people solve a problem they have an uncanny ability to bring to bear on it just the information that is most relevant to it.

The latter may be the upshot of his discussion of the ‘minimal’ computational theory of mind.