Abstract
In the present chapter, I want to take issue with a view of the mind as, most basically, a reasoning device. It is the view that the mind consists of formal operations over abstract items that are called symbols. The symbols, as well as the operations over them, are then assumed to be physically implemented in the brain. This view, or better: cluster of views, is widespread in current analytic philosophy of mind, and it has shaped a good deal of the debate on mental causation.
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References
One well-known precursor is Leibniz.
See, for instance, Dennett 1984.
Apart from all this, what a Language of Thought is supposed to be has never been very clear. Pinker (1997) mentions four formats of representation in the brain: the visual, the phonological, the grammatical, and, indeed, ‘Mentalese.’ Now this may be a credible form of the hypothesis, but then, it does not seem very ‘computationalist’ about propositional attitudes anymore. For when we apply commonsense (belief-desire) psychology, we do not seem to distinguish the formats at all, which suggests that the level of explanation of beliefs and desires is quite different from the level of explanation featuring these formats.
A range of powerful arguments against computationalism that I do not discuss here can be found in Hendriks-Jansen 1996.
For interesting work see Deacon 1997, Donald 1991, Jackendoff 1994, and Pinker 1994.
Th•s, I believe is the central idea of Slors 1994: Dennett’s claim that believing that p is just a matter of being an appropriate object for ‘the intentional stance’ faces the problem that it is impossible to explain what adopting that stance amounts to without a further, more realist account of intentional states.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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De Muijnck, W. (2003). Against the Computational Theory. In: Dependencies, Connections, and Other Relations. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0121-1_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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