Abstract
The current controversies about mechanism (or computationalism) in Cognitive Science (CS, for short) cannot be properly understood without having a relatively clear idea of what mechanism in CS is. Turing’s thesis (TT, for short) contributes to clarifying the meaning of the expressions ‘mechanistic theory’ and ‘mechanism’. This is the basic view, whose motivations are made explicit in section 2, of the import of TT for the philosophy of CS. In particular, TT enables one to set a necessary condition (hereinafter referred to as Cf) on theories in CS to count as mechanistic. This is a functional condition requiring that the laws accounting for the input/output behavior of the subjects in the domain of the theory be expressible in terms of Turing computable functions.
I am especially grateful to Wilfried Sieg for many invaluable suggestions and comments, and stimulating discussions —for over fifteen years now, and in many different places— on various issues bearing on the problems addressed here. I am glad that I have had the privilege to have discussed this paper with Robin Gandy, before his recent death. I wish to thank Aldo Aiello, Pantaleo Aloisio, Roberto Cordeschi, Marcello Frixione, Salvatore Guccione, Leen Spruit, Settimo Termini, and Giuseppe Trautteur for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Materials from this paper were also presented in talks at Università di Salerno, Dipartimento di Filosofia, and Istituto di Cibernetica C.N.R., Reparto di Informatica. I thank each of these audiences.
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Tamburrini, G. (1997). Mechanistic Theories in Cognitive Science: The Import of Turing’s Thesis . In: Dalla Chiara, M.L., Doets, K., Mundici, D., van Benthem, J. (eds) Logic and Scientific Methods. Synthese Library, vol 259. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0487-8_13
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