Announcement: SPECIAL ISSUE: COMPUTATION AND THE MIND
Patrick Wilken
SPECIAL ISSUE: COMPUTATION AND THE MIND
Guest Editor: Rom Harr`, Georgetown University
(Volume 40, Number 6)
Human nature is most often explained in terms of cause and effect
relationships, as in the natural sciences whereby things conform to
physical, chemical, biological laws or givens. However, the natural
sciences do not adequately account for the complex psychological components
of human nature.
This is where Turing and his successors, who posit that thinking is to
brains as running a program is to machines, have made such an important
impact. We now recognize that people are not the stimulus-response
mechanisms of behaviorism, and know that it may be true that certain
behaviors may be explained in terms of how people assimilate rules and
roles and reflect these in their environment.
This Special Issue of *AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST* takes the Artificial
Intelligence approach (modeling human action on machines) and its obverse
(using machine analogies to understand human action) in order to begin
understanding the "role-rule way" by building on the "cause-effect
explanatory format". Central to the papers presented in *Computation and
the Mind* is the recognition that it is not an exclusive disjunction, that
it does not have to be one or the other.
*Computation and the Mind* begins with a paper by J. A. Fodor, who details
the basic principals of the computational approach to cognition. Following
is B. Jack Copeland who describes non-classical computing machines,
suggesting a broadening of the possibility of cognitive models. George L.
Farre discusses the development of a conceptual system for the
representation of energetic systems culminating in cognitive systems.
Connectionist or artificial neural network conceptions of thinking are
explored by Eileen C. Way as remedying the deficiencies of the well-known
"prototype" account of concepts proposed by Rosch. Thomas P. Urbach then
looks at relations between computational models and the way the brain
functions. The paper by Jerrold L. Aronson studies the analysis of
cognition and the formulation of mental models of cognitive processes. The
Guest Editor of *Computation and the Mind*, Rom Harr`, examines machine
simulation of intentionality.
The issue ends with a paper by John Shotter that sets limits on machine
models and forwards the point that the fundamental feature of human life is
that most of our actions are interactions.
Although there is a good deal of unanimity among the authors of
*Computation and the Mind* as to the problems of implementing computational
cognitive neuroscience as a psychology, there is also a good deal of
disagreement as to the limits and possibilities of the approach. The aim
of the issue is not to resolve these problems, but to present them as
fascinating food for thought.
The articles in this important Special Issue of *AMERICAN BEHAVIORAL
SCIENTIST* mark the cutting edge of a powerful if controversial paradigm
for a psychology of the future.
Contents:
*Introduction - Rom Harr`
*The Representational Theory of Mind - J. A. Fodor
*The Broad Conception of Computation - B. Jack Copeland
*The Energetic Structure of Observation: A Philosophical Disquisition -
George L. Farre
*Connectionism and Conceptual Structure - Eileen C. Way
*ERPS and Sentence Processing: From Brain to Mind: Event-Related Potential
Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Thomas P. Urbach
*Mental Models and Deduction - Jerrold A. Aronson
*Fitting the Body to the Mind - Rom Harr`
*AI and the Dialogical - John Shotter
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Patrick Wilken http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~patrickw/
Editor: PSYCHE: An International Journal of Research on Consciousness
Secretary: The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ http://www.phil.vt.edu/ASSC/