Saturday, April 10, 2010

Problems for Rowlands' MotC

1. Chatterbots seem to satisfy Rowlands' conditions but are not cognitive agents.
2. Pure look-up tables seems to satisfy Rowland's conditions, but are not cognitive agents.
3. CD players seem to satisfy Rowland's conditions, but are not cognitive agents.

So, it looks like Rowlands needs some additional restriction on what kinds of manipulations are performed on non-derived representations.  Of course, that would make his view even more similar to the Adams and Aizawa view.


A process P is a cognitive process if and only if:
(1) P involves information processing—the manipulation and transformation of
information-bearing structures.
(2) This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was
(or would have been) prior to (or without) this processing, unavailable.
(3) This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject
of P, of a representational state.
(4) P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state.  (Rowlands, 2009, p. 8)

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