ABSTRACT

Many philosophical accounts of the computational theory of mind focus on Turing machines or Turing-equivalent computational formalisms. The recurrent allusions to Turing machines and Turing-equivalent computing devices suggest that the history of the computational theory of mind is the history of the birth of Turing machines and their subsequent influence. This chapter reviews some of the papers that are sometimes taken to have been among the founding documents of cognitive science, namely, three of the papers presented at the Symposium on Information Theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These papers are George Miller's "Human Memory and the Storage of Information", Noam Chomsky's "Three Models for the Description of Language", and Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's "The Logic Theory Machine: A Complex Information Processing System". Each of these works reveals a thinker, or thinkers, working on relatively narrow projects which, only in subsequent years, became incorporated into "the computational theory of mind".