10.7—
Computation and Its Competition

This mention of competing research programmes provides a natural transition to a final point to be made in this chapter. What I have tried to provide here is an alternative approach to assessing the importance of the computational paradigm in psychology—a way of looking at the question, "If computational psychology is a successful research programme, what is it that it will have contributed to psychology?" My answer has been that computational psychology tries to endow psychology with two good-making qualities that have often been viewed as highly (even crucially) important to the maturation of sciences: namely, mathematical and connective maturity. But we should note that both the question and the answer are highly conditional: they concern what computational psychology would do if carried out successfully. Of course it is an open question whether it can or will be carried out successfully, so none of the preceding is meant as an endorsement of the computational approach to psychology as the right approach. It is an approach that is on the table, and as philosophers of science we are obliged to assess its promise.

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that there are serious issues concerning the viability and prospects of the research programme. First, like any research programme, it may simply not succeed even on its own terms by failing to achieve any fundamental explanatory successes. Second, there have been serious arguments raised by writers like Dreyfus (1972) and Winograd and Flores (1986) to the effect that there are properties of the mind that symbol-manipulating systems cannot duplicate, and even more fundamental objections by writers like Ryle

(1949), Wittgenstein (1958), and the Verstehen tradition to the interpretation of psychological ascriptions now called the "theory-theory." I think these are all serious issues, and any one of them could turn out to have serious implications for the possible applications of rival models of the mind.

Finally, any successes of the computational approach to the mind in accordance with BCTM would also have to be assessed by comparison with the successes of rival research projects such as those arising out of neural network approaches or information theory. A brief list of issues might include but not be limited to:

The availability of exact mathematical descriptions for a wide variety of psychological phenomena.

The "naturalness" of these descriptions to their subject matter. (For example, the classical computational approach seems to have a natural way of approaching the attitude-content structure of intentional states. Do other approaches have an equally intuitive way of reflecting this feature in their models? Likewise, connectionist models seem naturally suited to modeling the behavior of fields of neurons, and information theory seems to have a natural way of talking about fidelity of intentional states.)

The comparative elegance of the models. (Can one approach supply straightforward descriptions and explanations where another requires a mass of ugly kludges?)

The tradeoffs between having a general framework (such as rule-conforming counter transformations or the technical notion of information) and having the freedom to employ an eclectic batch of mathematical tools.

The ways in which alternative research programmes are really competitors, and the extent to which they are ultimately compatible—because their formalisms turn out to be equivalent, for example, or because they are really engaged with different aspects of cognition or different questions about the mind.

The investigation of these questions will constitute a serious philosophical research programme in its own right, and will not be undertaken here. However, one important result of the discussion that has preceded in this book is the following: one might have thought that the approach to the mind found in CTM should enjoy pride of place over some of its

competitors because it solves certain philosophical problems (explaining intentionality and vindicating intentional psychology) that its competitors have no strategies for solving. But I have tried to argue that it fails to solve these problems, and that its true benefits lie in how it might provide virtues wholly internal to the science of psychology. But without the philosophical claims to confer pride of place upon CTM, there is a level playing field. We may now assess the comparative merits of CTM, connectionism, and neuroscience on wholly scientific grounds as scientific research programmes. This, I believe, effectively separates a set of questions about the philosophy of mind (such as the mind-body problem and the question of the precise metaphysical relationship between mental states and the bodily states through which they are realized) from questions about the science of the mind (such as what the important goodmaking qualities are for such a science). And this, I believe, is progress.