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Recursion Hypothesis Considered as a Research Program for Cognitive Science

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Abstract

Humans grasp discrete infinities within several cognitive domains, such as in language, thought, social cognition and tool-making. It is sometimes suggested that any such generative ability is based on a computational system processing hierarchical and recursive mental representations. One view concerning such generativity has been that each of the mind’s modules defining a cognitive domain implements its own recursive computational system. In this paper recent evidence to the contrary is reviewed and it is proposed that there is only one supramodal computational system with recursion in the human mind. A recursion thesis is defined, according to which the hominin cognitive evolution is constituted by a recent punctuated genetic mutation that installed the general, supramodal capacity for recursion into the human nervous system on top of the existing, evolutionarily older cognitive structures, and it is argued on the basis of empirical evidence and theoretical considerations that the recursion thesis constitutes a plausible research program for cognitive science.

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Notes

  1. The conceptual leap from Descartes’ dualistic theory of creativity to the present day naturalism was made by Alan Turing, who designed a physically implementable model of an effective algorithmic process that could be implemented in entirely mechanical terms and which could, in principle, handle computational processes that are creative in Descartes’ sense. Turing’s work can be understood against the background of a larger mathematical effort to make mathematics more rigorous, but it was precisely the work of Turing and his colleagues involved in the same project that delivered us the rigorous understanding of what recursion is and how it works. Still today, the explanation of the origins and nature of human creativity is based on the resulting concept of recursion.

  2. In the first formulation of the generative grammar (Chomsky 1955), recursion was implemented by “generalized transformation” that combined linguistic phrase-structures together at special junctions. This device reincarnates in the more recent minimalist program, now called Merge (Chomsky 2006, pp. 3-4). Newell and Simon’s original attempts at modeling human problem solving were based on an idea that there exists a general problem solver, a recursive search algorithm that could apply to any conceptual material (Newell & Simon 1963).

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Pauli Brattico

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Brattico, P. Recursion Hypothesis Considered as a Research Program for Cognitive Science. Minds & Machines 20, 213–241 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-010-9189-8

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