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Nov 15, 2019 · Human thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are rooted in the brain, where a complex network of cells receives information from the internal and external environment, transforming this information into our experience of ourselves, the world around us, and our relationships with it. It goes without saying that how this happens is still being explored.
- STEVEN PINKER
- The Concept of Specialization in How the Mind Works
- The Appeal to Evolution in How the Mind Works
- The Concept of Computation in The Mind Doesn’t Work that Way
- Fodor on the Limits of Computational Psychology
- Problems with Fodor’s Critique of Computational Psychology
- The Concept of ‘Modularity’ in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way
- The Dismissal of Evolution in TMDWTW
- Summary and Conclusion
Abstract: In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’ (in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans’ ability to perform abduction (inference to the best explanation); (2) th...
HTMW does not try to account for all of human behavior using a few general-purpose principles such as a large brain, culture, language, socialization, learn-ing, complexity, self-organization, or neural-network dynamics. Rather, the mind is said to embrace subsystems dedicated to particular kinds of reasoning or goals (pp. 27–31). Our intelligence,...
Evolution is the third key idea in HTMW (pp. 21–24; chap. 3). The organs of computation that make up the human mind are not tailored to solve arbitrary computational problems but only those that increased the reproductive chances of our ancestors living as foragers in pre-state societies. One advantage of invoking evolution is that it provides psyc...
In TMDWTW, Fodor argues that he never meant that all of the mind could be explained as a kind of computation. On the contrary, there is a key thing that a human mind can do but which a computational system cannot do. I will discuss this allegedly special human feat soon, but the debate cannot proceed if HTMW and TMDWTW don’t mean the same thing by ...
Fodor believes he has identified a feat that human minds can do but that Turing machines and their kin cannot do.4 He calls this feat ‘abduction’, ‘globality’, the ‘frame problem’, and ‘inference to the best explanation’. Frustratingly, Fodor never gives a clear definition of what he means by abduc-tion, nor does he work through an example that lay...
But Fodor’s supposed chasm can be narrowed from both sides. Let’s begin with the human mind’s powers of abduction. Fodor’s reliance on examples from the history of science to illustrate the inimitable feats of cognition has an obvious problem: the two work in very different ways. A given scientific inference is accomplished by a community of thousa...
Constraint satisfaction architecture is one part of the solution to abduction in HTMW, but one still needs principles on how such networks are organized into mutually relevant collections of knowledge. This is one of the motivations for the second major theme in the book, specialization or domain-specificity. Rather than comprising a single set of ...
Fodor advances four arguments that evolution has nothing to add to our under-standing of how the mind works. 1. Fitness and truth. Treating the mind as an organ whose ultimate function is to promote Darwinian fitness, Fodor claims, has no advantage over the biologically 7 See (Barrett, in press) for similar arguments, using ‘enzymes’ rather than or...
In HTMW, I defended a theory of how the mind works that was built on the notions of computation, specialization, and evolution. Specifically, it holds that the mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’ because (1) Turing Machines cannot do abduction, (2) a massively modular syst...
Mar 8, 2016 · Functionalists say that the mind is what the brain does, which is a procedural view. You can have the same thought processes happen in very different physical media; an alien with an entirely different biology would still have the capacity for thought. Identity theorists, on the other hand, emphasize that the mind is the brain, and that’s all ...
Apr 22, 2014 · How the Mind Works MP3 CD – MP3 Audio, April 22, 2014. How the Mind Works. MP3 CD – MP3 Audio, April 22, 2014. by Steven Pinker (Author), Mel Foster (Reader) 4.4 1,060 ratings. Part of: Allen Lane History (52 books) See all formats and editions. In this delightful, acclaimed bestseller, one of the world’s leading cognitive scientists ...
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- Steven Pinker
Abstract: In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’ (in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans’ ability to perform abduction (inference to the best ...
- Steven Pinker
- 2005
Overview. How the Mind Works is a 1997 non-fiction book by Steven Pinker, who presents his ideas on how the human mind developed and how it produces the feats we take for granted every day, such as talking, walking, and making friends. Pinker is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies language acquisition in children.
Jan 1, 2009 · Abstract. Cognitive scientists must understand not just what the mind does, but how it does what it does. In this paper, I consider four aspects of cognitive architecture: how the mind develops, the extent to which it is or is not modular, the extent to which it is or is not optimal, and the extent to which it should or should not be considered ...
