COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND

Rad ne sadrži sažetak.The Computational Theory of Mind, as advanced by Jerry A. Fodor and Zenon W. Pylyshyn, is a position according to which the mind is essentially a computational system. The Computational Theory of Mind purports to explain both mental states and mental processes. Mental states are seen as relations of organisms toward mental representations, the mental representations being discrete mental symbols in a “language of thought”. On the other hand, mental processes are seen as transformations upon those symbols, similar to operations of a Turing machine. The position had been one of the central theses of the newly emerged fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence for many years, until a different approach, known as Connectionism, gained popularity and became a plausible alternative to the classical approach. Since its appearance, the Computational Theory of Mind has been criticized on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The empirical criticism is based on research in artificial intelligence and neuroscience, while the best known theoretical argument against the computational approach is the Chinese room argument by John Searle