Abstract
Professor Arthur Burks, in his Presidential Address to the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1973 developed the thesis that a man is a finite, possibly probabilistic, automaton (Burks, 1972–73). This mechanist or computationalist philosophy of man is of course a version of the fairly widespread view that the mind is an information processing system of some kind. Burks’ typically and admirably clear address both developed this picture of man far more definitely and precisely than is usual in most philosophical discussions and added an ingenious argument in support of the thesis based on the psychological principle of just noticeable difference.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Nelson, R.J. (1990). On Guiding Rules. In: Salmon, M.H. (eds) The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism. Synthese Library, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0987-8_9
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