Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular ...

Hilary Putnam has argued that computational functionalism cannot serve as a foundation for the study of the mind, as every ordinary open physical system implements every finite-state automaton. I argue that Putnam's argument fails, but that it points out the need for a better understanding of the bridge between the theory of computation and the theory of physical systems: the relation of implementation. It also raises questions about the class of automata that can serve as a basis for understanding the (...) mind. I develop an account of implementation, linked to an appropriate class of automata, such that the requirement that a system implement a given automaton places a very strong constraint on the system. This clears the way for computation to play a central role in the analysis of mind. (shrink)

The book from which these sections are excerpted is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated structures along (...) an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term. (shrink)

To clarify the notion of computation and its role in cognitive science, we need an account of implementation, the nexus between abstract computations and physical systems. I provide such an account, based on the idea that a physical system implements a computation if the causal structure of the system mirrors the formal structure of the computation. The account is developed for the class of combinatorial-state automata, but is sufficiently general to cover all other discrete computational formalisms. The implementation relation is (...) non-vacuous, so that criticisms by Searle and others fail. This account of computation can be extended to justify the foundational role of computation in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (shrink)

This anthology, intended to accompany _A Companion to Metaphysics_, brings together over 60 selections which represent the best and most important works in metaphysics during this century. The selections are grouped under ten major metaphysical problems and each section is preceded by an introduction by the editors.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth a sense in which programs can and do explain behavior, and to distinguish from this a number of senses in which they do not. Once we are tolerably clear concerning the sort of explanatory strategy being employed, two rather interesting facts emerge; (1) though it is true that programs are "internally represented," this fact has no explanatory interest beyond the mere fact that the program is executed; (2) programs which are couched (...) in information processing terms may have an explanatory interest for a given range of behavior which is independent of physiological explanations of the same range of behavior. (shrink)

There are different ways to present a Presidential Address to the APA; the one I have chosen is simply to report on work that I am doing right now, on work in progress. I am going to present some of my further explorations into the computational model of the mind.\**.

Noam Chomsky and other linguists and psychologists have suggested that human linguistic behavior is somehow governed by a mental representation of a transformational grammar. Challenges to this controversial claim have often been met by invoking an explicitly computational perspective: It makes perfect sense to suppose that a grammar could be represented in the memory of a computational device and that this grammar could govern the device's use of a language. This paper urges, however, that the claim that humans are such (...) a device is unsupported and that it seems unlikely that linguists and psychologists really want to claim any such thing. Evidence for the linguists' original claim is drawn from three main sources: the explanation of language comprehension and other linguistic abilities; evidence for formal properties of the rules of the grammar; and the explanation of language acquisition. It is argued in this paper that none of these sources provides support for the view that the grammar governs language processing in something like the way a program governs the operation of a programmed machine. The computational approach, on the contrary, suggests ways in which linguistic abilities can be explained without the attribution of any explicit representation of rules governing linguistic behavior. (shrink)