Abstract
As a professional philosopher, of course, I have become accustomed to the truth that no position is so absurd that some philosopher has not held it. As a human being, of course, I have also had to personally cope with experiences in life that have involved formal systems and syntax processing. Sometimes our professional activities become detached from our life experiences to a degree that might astonish empirical scientists. Our enthusiasm for a theoretical position may even appear to be virtually independent of our experiences in life, which, were they only taken seriously, might completely undermine what we take as our best theories. The computational conception that dominates what is known as “cognitive science” provides a remarkable illustration of this point. Even if some of our thought processes are computational, most of them are not, which makes our best theory either trivial or false. We need something better.
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Fetzer, J.H. (2001). People are not Computers. In: Computers and Cognition: Why Minds are not Machines. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0973-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0973-7_7
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