The Computational View of the Human Mind

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the computational view of the human mind is a philosophical and biological approach to the human mental processes, whereby the mind is likened, quite literally, to a digital computer. In particular, it looks at how philosophers of language and learning theory, such as Jerry Fodor, have since developed its central philosophical and biological assumption and how the attraction of CTM for philosophers and scientists may initially have been because of the seductive simplicity of the digital computer model for explaining cognitive phenomena. It discusses how working out the epistemological difficulties of the linguistic component of CTM has proved problematic since the early, heady days of its origins and has since been contrasted with the ?neural net? model of connectivist philosophy.

From the Paper:

"The attraction of the computational model for students of linguists rests in its connections with Chomskian linguistics. Noam Chomsky argued that rather than children simply being "conditioned" to learn language, the mind of a child's ability to latch on to grammatical rules, and to be able to apply them in indefinitely many novel contexts, required an "inner language of thought." Chomskian linguistics was thus viewed as requiring, according to computationalists that the human mind must have a computational element, or a kind of hard-wiring for the ability to receive language that transcended any Skinner-like ideal of conditioning. (Chomsky, 1959)"

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