Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

He now defines the Computational Theory of Mind as ‘whether the architecture of (human) cognition is interestingly like the architecture of Turing’s kind of computer’ (p. 105, note 3).

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

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.

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

Abduction really is a terrible problem for cognitive science, one that is unlikely to be solved by any kind of theory we have heard of so far’ (p. 41).

Given the complexity of human behavior, a theory that posits some two dozen emotions and reasoning faculties (distinguishing, for example, fear from sexual jealousy from the number sense) is far from profligate (especially compared to Fodor’s tolerance for the possibility that people are born with 50,000 concepts).

Similarly, he argues, astrophysical theory has few implications for botany, quantum mechanics is irrelevant to demography, and lunar geography does not constrain cellular mitosis.

Why should it be any different for ‘your favorite theory about how the mind works and your favorite theory of how evolution works?’ (p. 82).

A common (and lazy) criticism of the theory of natural selection is that it is circular.

Summary and Conclusion In HTMW, I defended a theory of how the mind works that was built on the notions of computation, specialization, and evolution.