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
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Stacewicz, Paweł pawel.stacewicz@pw.edu.pl 0000-0003-2500-4086 Kubiak, Adam P. adampkubiak@gmail.com 0000-0001-7178-3784 Greif, Hajo mail@hajo-greif.net 0000-0002-1003-7494
Keywords:	computation, mechanism, reductionism, morphogenesis, artificial intelligence, mind
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Computation/Information > Classical General Issues > History of Science Case Studies
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
Date:	26 September 2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23957

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