Author: Gualtiero Piccinini

The received view in the philosophy of cognitive science is that cognition is (largely explained by) a kind of digital computation, and computation requires representation. Therefore, if neurocognitive systems are computational, they manipulate digital representations of some sort. According to this received view, representations are unobservable entities posited by successful …

The modern computational theory of cognition began after Alan Turing (1936) published his mathematical theory of computation in terms of what are now known as Turing machines. Contrary to a popular misconception, however, it wasn’t Turing who turned his machines into a model of cognition. That step was taken by …

In my previous post, I mentioned that mechanistic explanations are functional. What I mean by that is that mechanisms and their component parts have functions and such functions contribute to mechanistic explanation because, by performing their functions, components contribute to the activities of the whole mechanism. The notion of function …