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  1. Church's thesis and cognitive science.R. J. Nelson - 1987 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 28 (4):581-614.
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  • Computational explanation and mechanistic explanation of mind.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2007 - In Francesco Ferretti, Massimo Marraffa & Mario De Caro (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: The Interface between Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Springer. pp. 343-353.
    According to the computational theory of mind (CTM), mental capacities are explained by inner computations, which in biological organisms are realized in the brain. Computational explanation is so popular and entrenched that it’s common for scientists and philosophers to assume CTM without argument.
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  • Functionalism at Forty: A Critical Retrospective.Paul M. Churchland - 2005 - Journal of Philosophy 102 (1):33 - 50.
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  • Chomsky and His Critics.Frances Egan - 2003 - Malden MA: Blackwell.
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  • Functionalism, psychology, and the philosophy of mind.K. V. Wilkes - 1981 - Philosophical Topics 12 (1):147-167.
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  • Pathways to biomedical discovery.Paul Thagard - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (2):235-254.
    A biochemical pathway is a sequence of chemical reactions in a biological organism. Such pathways specify mechanisms that explain how cells carry out their major functions by means of molecules and reactions that produce regular changes. Many diseases can be explained by defects in pathways, and new treatments often involve finding drugs that correct those defects. This paper presents explanation schemas and treatment strategies that characterize how thinking about pathways contributes to biomedical discovery. It discusses the significance of pathways for (...)
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  • Activities and causation: The metaphysics and epistemology of mechanisms.Peter Machamer - 2004 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 (1):27 – 39.
    This article deals with mechanisms conceived as composed of entities and activities. In response to many perplexities about the nature of activities, a number of arguments are developed concerning their epistemic and ontological status. Some questions concerning the relations between cause and causal explanation and mechanisms are also addressed.
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  • Mental mechanisms: Philosophical perspectives on the sciences of cognition and the brain.William P. Bechtel - manuscript
    1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.
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  • The appeal to tacit knowledge in psychological explanation.Jerry A. Fodor - 1968 - Journal of Philosophy 65 (October):627-40.
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  • Psychological laws.William G. Lycan - 1981 - Philosophical Topics 12 (3):9-38.
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  • Why everything doesn't realize every computation.Ronald L. Chrisley - 1994 - Minds and Machines 4 (4):403-20.
    Some have suggested that there is no fact to the matter as to whether or not a particular physical system relaizes a particular computational description. This suggestion has been taken to imply that computational states are not real, and cannot, for example, provide a foundation for the cognitive sciences. In particular, Putnam has argued that every ordinary open physical system realizes every abstract finite automaton, implying that the fact that a particular computational characterization applies to a physical system does not (...)
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  • Computational vs. causal complexity.Matthias Scheutz - 2001 - Minds and Machines 11 (4):543-566.
    The main claim of this paper is that notions of implementation based on an isomorphic correspondence between physical and computational states are not tenable. Rather, ``implementation'' has to be based on the notion of ``bisimulation'' in order to be able to block unwanted implementation results and incorporate intuitions from computational practice. A formal definition of implementation is suggested, which satisfies theoretical and practical requirements and may also be used to make the functionalist notion of ``physical realization'' precise. The upshot of (...)
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  • Why we view the brain as a computer.Oron Shagrir - 2006 - Synthese 153 (3):393-416.
    The view that the brain is a sort of computer has functioned as a theoretical guideline both in cognitive science and, more recently, in neuroscience. But since we can view every physical system as a computer, it has been less than clear what this view amounts to. By considering in some detail a seminal study in computational neuroscience, I first suggest that neuroscientists invoke the computational outlook to explain regularities that are formulated in terms of the information content of electrical (...)
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  • Programs in the explanation of behavior.Robert Cummins - 1977 - Philosophy of Science 44 (June):269-87.
    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 (...)
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  • Connectionism, computation, and cognition.Robert C. Cummins & Georg Schwarz - 1991 - In Terence E. Horgan & John L. Tienson (eds.), Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 60--73.
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  • Mechanism, Mentalism and Metamathematics: An Essay on Finitism.Judson Webb - 1980 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    This book grew out of a graduate student paper [261] in which I set down some criticisms of J. R. Lucas' attempt to refute mechanism by means of G6del's theorem. I had made several such abortive attempts myself and had become familiar with their pitfalls, and especially with the double edged nature of incompleteness arguments. My original idea was to model the refutation of mechanism on the almost universally accepted G6delian refutation of Hilbert's formalism, but I kept getting stuck on (...)
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  • The metaphysics of realization, multiple realizability, and the special sciences.Carl Gillett - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (11):591-603.
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  • The metaphysics of irreducibility.Derk Pereboom & Hilary Kornblith - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 63 (August):125-45.
    During the 'sixties and 'seventies, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and Richard Boyd, among others, developed a type of materialism that eschews reductionist claims.1 In this view, explana- tions, natural kinds, and properties in psychology do not reduce to counterparts in more basic sciences, such as neurophysiology or physics. Nevertheless, all token psychological entities-- states, processes, and faculties--are wholly constituted of physical entities, ultimately out of entities over which microphysics quantifies. This view quickly became the standard position in philosophy of mind, (...)
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  • Multiple realization, computation and the taxonomy of psychological states.Oron Shagrir - 1998 - Synthese 114 (3):445-461.
    The paper criticizes standard functionalist arguments for multiple realization. It focuses on arguments in which psychological states are conceived as computational, which is precisely where the multiple realization doctrine has seemed the strongest. It is argued that a type-type identity thesis between computational states and physical states is no less plausible than a multiple realization thesis. The paper also presents, more tentatively, positive arguments for a picture of local reduction.
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  • Individualism and the nature of syntactic states.Thomas Bontly - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4):557-574.
    It is widely assumed that the explanatory states of scientific psychology are type-individuated by their semantic or intentional properties. First, I argue that this assumption is implausible for theories like David Marr's [1982] that seek to provide computational or syntactic explanations of psychological processes. Second, I examine the implications of this conclusion for the debate over psychological individualism. While most philosophers suppose that syntactic states supervene on the intrinsic physical states of information-processing systems, I contend they may not. Syntatic descriptions (...)
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  • Content, computation and externalism.Oron Shagrir - 2001 - Mind 110 (438):369-400.
    The paper presents an extended argument for the claim that mental content impacts the computational individuation of a cognitive system (section 2). The argument starts with the observation that a cognitive system may simultaneously implement a variety of different syntactic structures, but that the computational identity of a cognitive system is given by only one of these implemented syntactic structures. It is then asked what are the features that determine which of implemented syntactic structures is the computational structure of the (...)
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