So How Does the Mind Work? - Steven Pinker

So HowDoesthe mind Work? Steven PINKERA bstract:In my bookHow the mind Works, I defended the theory that thehuman mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claimsthat the mind doesn t work that way (in a book with that title) because (1) TuringMachines cannot duplicate humans ability to perform abduction (inference to the bestexplanation); (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such asystem is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our under-standing of the mind . In this review I show that these arguments are flawed. First, myclaim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks(that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practicallimitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant. Second, Fodor identifies abductionwith the cumulative accomplishments of the scientific community over is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so thesupposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be , my claim about biological specialization, as seen in organ systems, is distinctfrom Fodor s own notion of encapsulated modules, so the limitations of the latter areirrelevant.

the key idea of the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s—that the mind ... transitions are designed to mirror operations in probability theory or fuzzy logic rather than in classical logic). Any adequate characterization of the concept of ‘computation’ should embrace these possibilities. After all, the term digital computer

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  Cognitive, Logic, Mind, Fuzzy logic, Fuzzy

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