How Computation Explains

I discuss the monumental shift in our understanding of the brain triggered by the project of computational cognitive science: the use of tools, concepts, and strategies from the computer sciences to investigate the brain. Philosophers have typically understood this project, and the computational explanations it provides, to assume that the brain is a computer, in a sense to be specified by the metaphysics of computation. That metaphysics, by revealing what exactly we attribute to the brain when we say it computes, is supposed to show how and why computational explanations work, and in doing so to provide a philosophical foundation for them. In contrast, I give an account of computational explanation that focuses on the resources computational explanations bring to bear on the study of the brain. I argue that computational explanations help cognitive scientists build perspicuous models that capture precisely the kinds of causal structures they seek, and that no metaphysics of computation is required to understand how they do this