ABSTRACT
By computationalism in cognitive science I mean the view that cognition essentially is a matter of the computations that a cognitive system performs in certain situations. The main thesis I am going to defend is that computationalism is only consistent with symbolic modeling or, more generally, with any other type of computational modeling. In particular, those scientific explanations of cognition which are based on (i) an important class of connectionist models or (ii) nonconnectionist continuous models cannot be computational, for these models are not the kind of system which can perform computations in the sense of standard computation theory. Arguing for this negative conclusion requires a formal explication of the intuitive notion of computational system. Thus, if my thesis is correct, we are left with the following alternative. Either we construe computationalism by explicitly referring to some nonstandard notion of computation, or we simply abandon the idea that computationalism be a basic hypothesis shared by all current research in cognitive science. I will finally suggest that a different hypothesis, dynamicism, may represent a viable alternative to computationalism. According to it, cognition essentially is a matter of the state evolutions that a cognitive system undergoes in certain situations.
