Moving beyond Metaphors: Understanding the Mind for What It Is

In the last 50 years, there have been three major approaches to understanding cognitive systems and theorizing about the nature of the mind: symbolicism, connectionism, and dynamicism. Each of these approaches has relied heavily on a preferred metaphor for understanding the mind/brain. Most famously, symbolicism, or classical cognitive science, relies on the “mind as computer” metaphor. Under this view, the mind is the software of the brain. Jerry Fodor, 1 for one, has argued that the impressive theoretical power provided by this metaphor is good reason to suppose that cognitive systems have a symbolic “language of thought” which, like a computer programming language, expresses the rules that the system follows. Fodor claims that this metaphor is essential for providing a useful account of how the mind works.