3 - An empirical argument: the computational argument

Summary

It has often been thought (Devitt 1990, 1991; Egan 1992; Fodor 1981a, 1987; Segal 1989a, 1991) that individualism in psychology receives support from the computational theory of mind, a view taken by many philosophers and cognitive scientists to be a foundational assumption of contemporary research in cognitive science (Cummins 1989; Pylyshyn 1984). The computational theory of mind, or computationalism, can be summarized as the view that psychological processes and states are essentially computational. It makes an empirical claim about the nature of cognitive processing and suggests to many a methodological claim about how cognitive psychology or the cognitive sciences more generally ought to proceed.

A question that arose in the conclusion to Chapter 2 was: Given that global individualism is not a general constraint on scientific explanation, what is different or special about psychological explanation that makes individualism a constraint on it? Computationalism provides the basis for an answer to this question: What is special about psychology is that it theorizes about mental processes qua computational processes, and computational processes must be individualistic. An appropriately refined version of this argument will be the focus of discussion in this chapter.

COMPUTATIONALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

One could view the computational argument for individualism as having the same form as the argument from causal powers: The latter claims that mental processes are individualistic because of psychology's scientific nature, and the former claims that they are individualistic because of cognition's computational nature.