Pancomputationalism is the view that everything is a computer. This, if true, poses some difficulties to the computational theory of cognition. In particular, the strongest version of it suggested by John Searle seems enough to trivialize computational cognitivists’ core idea on which our cognitive system is a computing system. The aim of this paper is to argue against Searle’s pancomputationalism. To achieve this, I will draw a line between realized computers and unrealized computers. Through this distinction, I expect that it (...) will become evident that Searle’s pancomputationalism should be understood in terms of unrealized computers, while the computational theory of cognition is concerned with realized computers. (shrink)

A skeptical worry known as ‘the indeterminacy of computation’ animates much recent philosophical reflection on the computational identity of physical systems. On the one hand, computational explanation seems to require that physical computing systems fall under a single, unique computational description at a time. On the other, if a physical system falls under any computational description, it seems to fall under many simultaneously. Absent some principled reason to take just one of these descriptions in particular as relevant for computational explanation, (...) widespread failure of computational explanation would appear to follow. This paper advances a new solution to the indeterminacy of computation. Very roughly, I argue that the computational identity of a physical system is determinate relative to a contextually specified way of regarding that system computationally—known as a labelling scheme. When a system simultaneously implements multiple computations, it does so relative to different labelling schemes. But relative to a fixed labelling scheme, a physical system has a unique computational identity. I argue that this relativistic conception of computational identity vindicates computational explanation in the face of simultaneous implementation. (shrink)

The dominant account of propositions holds that they are structured entities that have, as constituents, the semantic values of the constituents of the sentences that express them. Since such theories hold that propositions are structured, in some sense, like the sentences that express them, they must provide an answer to what I will call Soames’ Question: “What level, or levels, of sentence structure does semantic information incorporate?”. As it turns out, answering Soames’ Question is no easy task. I argue in (...) this paper that the two most promising ways of answering it, the Logical Form Account and the LF Account, are both unsatisfactory. This result casts doubt on the very idea that propositions are structured. (shrink)