Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I’d accuse computationalism of being “cryptodualism” except that Chomsky’s project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.
If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that’s fine. I have no problem with that. If you’re going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates “the mind” and the posits of folk psychology then you’re making a very different argument altogether. Skinner’s belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.
Having Chomsky, of all people, accused of denying the importance of biology? Chomsky was the guy that said “we need psycholinguistics to verify predictions of linguistics”—and thus, along with Müller, basically created psycholinguistics. Chomsky remains the guy who radically inspects the field once in a while with a question of “yes, that’s cool, but how a child could learn it?” Chomsky expects progress of neurobiology due to linguistics, sure, but it does not mean that he believes that what we find in our brains is unimportant—quite the opposite, he believes that it is ultimately the same field (but we have too little data on brain—and we do have too little direct data).
(And on Cartesianity - I cringe at the mention of it but Chomsky said of Newton that the latter expelled the Machine out of the world and left the Ghost. Then again, this whole dualism thing seems rather fake to me.)
Skinner was correct that mind, intentionality, thought, desire, etc, are unscientific. Where behaviorism went wrong was ascribing behavior to conditioning and underplaying the role of biology (although Skinner never denied the importance of biology; unlike Chomsky and the computationalists). I’d accuse computationalism of being “cryptodualism” except that Chomsky’s project was explicitly Cartesian and was only non-dualistic in the sense that he believed the laws of physics would have to change to incorporate non-biological computational models of the mind.
If your view is simply that the brain is performing computations and that it makes sense to talk about them in terms of algorithms then that’s fine. I have no problem with that. If you’re going to argue, as some philosophers do, that this somehow vindicates “the mind” and the posits of folk psychology then you’re making a very different argument altogether. Skinner’s belief that intentionality is on par with Aristotelian teleological physics is perfectly compatible with the first view. The notion that calling the brain a computer and talking about algorithms naturalizes dualism (i.e., the algorithms are the mind and the brain is the implementation), on the other hand, is pure mysticism.
Having Chomsky, of all people, accused of denying the importance of biology? Chomsky was the guy that said “we need psycholinguistics to verify predictions of linguistics”—and thus, along with Müller, basically created psycholinguistics. Chomsky remains the guy who radically inspects the field once in a while with a question of “yes, that’s cool, but how a child could learn it?” Chomsky expects progress of neurobiology due to linguistics, sure, but it does not mean that he believes that what we find in our brains is unimportant—quite the opposite, he believes that it is ultimately the same field (but we have too little data on brain—and we do have too little direct data).
(And on Cartesianity - I cringe at the mention of it but Chomsky said of Newton that the latter expelled the Machine out of the world and left the Ghost. Then again, this whole dualism thing seems rather fake to me.)