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Welcome to Wales: Searle on the Computational Theory of Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

In a recent book devoted to giving an overview of cognitive science, Justin Lieber writes:

…dazzingly complex computational processes achieve our visual and linguistic understanding, but apart from a few levels of representation these are as little open to our conscious view as the multitudinous rhythm of blood flow through the countless vessels of our brain.

It is the aim of hundreds of workers in the allied fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence to unmask these computation processes and install them in digital computers.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1995

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References

1 An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 114.Google Scholar

2 Reported in University Life, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan. 1994), p. 228Google Scholar.

3 Garnham, A., Artificial Intelligence An Introduction (London: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1988).Google Scholar

4 Ibid., p. 231.

5 Particularly in his article ‘Is the brain's mind a computer program?’, Scientific American (Jan 1990)Google Scholar.

6 Ibid. p. 21.

7 Searle, John, Minds, Brains and Science (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 32.Google Scholar

8 As people acquainted with Chomsky's work will know, the early work in Transformational Grammar has been replaced by a principles-and-parameters approach. The language faculty is now conjectured to contain two parts. The first part consists of a nearly language-invariant computational procedure and the second part consists of a (highly) variant lexicon. A very important difference between the older approach and contemporary linguistic investigations is that the traditional grammatical constructions—noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc., are viewed ‘as taxonomic artifacts, their properties resulting from the interaction of far more general principles’. See Chomsky, N., ‘Language and nature’, Mind, Vol. 104 (1995), p. 413CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Barwise, J. and Etchemendy, J., Turing's World 3.0 An Introduction to Computability Theory (Stanford, California, 1993)Google Scholar.

10 Minds, Brains and Scienc., p. 34.

11 ‘Turing's Test’, in Smith, Newton, Viale, and Wilkes, (eds.), Modelling the Mind (Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

12 Gunderson, Keith, in ‘The imitation game’, Anderson, A. R. (ed.), Mind and Machines, (Englewood Cliffe, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1964)Google Scholar.

13 In his book Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963)Google Scholar.

14 Searle, John, ‘Is the brain a digital computer?’, Presidential Address, delivered to the American Philosophy Association, California, March 30 (1990), p. 35Google Scholar.

15 Ibid. p. 25.

16 Ibid. p. 29.

17 Ibid. p. 36.

18 Cottingham, J., A Descartes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 13Google Scholar.