A Bridge Between Cognitive Science and Neuroscience: The Functional Architecture of Mind

Abstract

Discussion within philosophy on the relation of cognition to neural phenomena, or of mind to body, has focused on two views in recent decades. Both views accept that mental events themselves are brain events with physical descriptions. But whereas the Identity Theory holds out the hope of nomological connections between types of brain events and types of mental events, Functionalism denies any such relation. Identity theorists envision an ultimate reduction of cognitive psychology to neuroscience whereas most functionalists deny that possibility. (Australian Identity Theorists such as Smart, 1959, and Armstrong, 1968, present that Identity Theory as a version of Functionalism. Smart’s topic-neutral specification of psychological events, for example, specifies mental events in terms of their interactions with other mental events or with sensory stimuli or behaviors. When I speak of Functionalism, however, I shall be referring to the American variety which sees Functionalism as an alternative to the Identity Theory.) This paper proposes that we approach the relation of mental events to brain events in a quite different way, using Pylyshyn’s (1980) notion of a functional architecture. After an overview of the conflict between Identity Theory and Functionalism, I will turn to explicating the notion of a functional architecture and show how it provides a more useful ontological framework for understanding how neuroscience and the emerging discipline of cognitive science can relate to each other.KeywordsVirtual MachineCognitive ScienceIdentity TheoryMental EventPhysical DescriptionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.