Computationalism, the Church-Turing thesis, and the Church-Turing fallacy (Q882835)

Piccinini considers the Church-Turing thesis (CTT ) that every effectively computable function is Turing computable in connection with the computational theory of mind, that is, the view that mental capacities are explained by inner computations. He evaluates three arguments that intend to ground the computational theory of mind on CTT and shows them not to be sound. The first argument assumes a physical version of CTT according to which all physically computable functions are Turing computable. The author distinguishes two versions of this assumption, in accordance to the sort of physical mechanism it had in mind, viz.: only computational physical systems or physical systems in general. The second argument presupposes that mental process are effective computations in the sense analyzed by Church and Turing, and the third argument invokes a methodological constraint on psychological theories to the effect that psychological theories should only be formulated in terms of effective procedures. In most of his paper, Piccinini centers the discussion on these assumptions or presuppositions in order to show the unsoundness of the three arguments.