Who's driving the syntactic engine?
Journal for General Philosophy of Science 40 (1):23 - 50 (2009)
| Abstract | The property of being the implementation of a computational structure has been argued to be vacuously instantiated. This claim provides the basis for most antirealist arguments in the field of the philosophy of computation. Standard manoeuvres for combating these antirealist arguments treat the problem as endogenous to computational theories. The contrastive analysis of computational and other mathematical representations put forward here reveals that the problem should instead be treated within the more general framework of the Newman problem in structuralist accounts of mathematical representation. It is argued that purely structuralist and purely functionalist accounts of implementation are inadequate to tackle the problem. An extensive evaluation of semantic accounts is provided, arguing that semantic properties are, unlike structural and functional ones, suitable to restrict the intended domain of implementation of computational properties in such a way as to block the Newman problem. The semantic hypothesis is defended from a number of recent objections. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDrew McDermott (2001). The Digital Computer as Red Herring. Psycoloquy 12 (54).
Ricardo Restrepo (2009). Russell's Structuralism and the Supposed Death of Computational Cognitive Science. Minds and Machines 19 (2):181-197.
Ricardo Restrepo Echavarria (2009). Russell's Structuralism and the Supposed Death of Computational Cognitive Science. Minds and Machines 19 (2):181-197.
Ricardo Restrepo Echavarria (2009). Russell's Structuralism and the Supposed Death of Computational Cognitive Science. Minds and Machines 19 (2).
Lukáš Sekanina (forthcoming). Evolved Computing Devices and the Implementation Problem. Minds and Machines.
Gualtiero Piccinini (2008). Computation Without Representation. Philosophical Studies 137 (2):205-241.
Edward P. Stabler Jr (1987). Kripke on Functionalism and Automata. Synthese 70 (1):1 - 22.
Matthias Scheutz (2001). Computational Vs. Causal Complexity. Minds And Machines 11 (4):543-566.
Michael Rescorla (forthcoming). Against Structuralist Theories of Computational Implementation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
Murat Aydede (2000). Computation and Intentional Psychology. Dialogue 39 (2):365-379.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-09-21Total downloads35 ( #34,187 of 549,578 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,418 of 549,578 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
