Functionalism, Computationalism, and Mental Contents

Functionalism, computationalism, and mental states

Some philosophers have conflated functionalism and computationalism. I reconstruct how this came about and uncover two assumptions that made the conflation possible. They are the assumptions that (i) psychological functional analyses are computational descriptions and (ii) everything may be described as performing computations. I argue that, if we want to improve our understanding of both the m...

Running head: MENTAL CONTENTS IN TRANSFER Mental Contents in Transfer

The purpose of this paper is to develop theoretical concepts for mental content-based investigations and explanations in the psychology of human thinking in general and transfer in specific. The schema-based analysis of transfer postulates that the solving of an earlier problem can influence a person’s future behaviour only to the degree of schematic similarity between the primary and the secon...

Computationalism under Attack

Since the early eighties, computationalism in the study of the mind has been “under attack” by several critics of the so-called “classic” or “symbolic” approaches in AI and cognitive science. Computationalism was generically identified with such approaches. For example, it was identified with both Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis and Jerry Fodor’s theory of Lan...

Extended cognition and functionalism

Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that the mind sometimes extends outside the body to encompass features of the environment (HEC). HEC has been criticised by Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa, and Robert Rupert. In this paper, I argue for two claims: (1) HEC is a harder target than those critics have supposed; HEC is entailed by functionalism, a commonly held view in philosophy of mind, and one to w...

Synaesthesia, Functionalism and Phenomenology