Stacewicz, Paweł and Kubiak, Adam P. and Greif, Hajo (2024) Was Turing a (Computational) Mechanist? [Preprint]
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Abstract
Alan M. Turing has introduced and explicated the notion of computational mechanism. It was
informed by classical philosophical mechanism and some of its characteristics are found in the
strand of ‘new mechanism’ in philosophy of science. However, rather than taking Turing‘s work
to be a paradigm of mechanism tout court, especially computational mechanism, we examine
the extent to which it may count as an exemplar of mechanism in the classical, modern and
even his own sense. We argue for numerous mechanist and non-mechanist aspects, both in the
classical and the Turingian sense, of his theorising throughout the various domains of his
inquiries. We conclude that Turing’s contributions are best viewed as an eclectic approach to
mechanism that combines some aspects of classical and an anticipation of new mechanism
while acknowledging some essential limitations to mechanism as a philosophical doctrine.
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Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||||||||
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Keywords: | computation, mechanism, reductionism, morphogenesis, artificial intelligence, mind | ||||||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Computation/Information > Classical General Issues > History of Science Case Studies |
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Depositing User: | Adam Kubiak | ||||||||||||
Date Deposited: | 27 Sep 2024 11:53 | ||||||||||||
Last Modified: | 27 Sep 2024 11:53 | ||||||||||||
Item ID: | 23957 | ||||||||||||
Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Computation/Information > Classical General Issues > History of Science Case Studies |
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Date: | 26 September 2024 | ||||||||||||
URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23957 |
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