Abstract
The mechanistic view of computation contends that computational explanations are mechanistic explanations. Mechanists, however, disagree about the precise role that the environment – or the so-called “contextual level” – plays for computational (mechanistic) explanations. We advance here two claims: (i) Contextual factors essentially determine the computational identity of a computing system (computational externalism); this means that specifying the “intrinsic” mechanism is not sufficient to fix the computational identity of the system. (ii) It is not necessary to specify the causal-mechanistic interaction between the system and its context in order to offer a complete and adequate computational explanation. While the first claim has been discussed before, the second has been practically ignored. After supporting these claims, we discuss the implications of our contextualist view for the mechanistic view of computational explanation. Our aim is to show that some versions of the mechanistic view are consistent with the contextualist view, whilst others are not.
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Notes
Coelho Mollo (2019), however, also considers individuating computation by appeal to teleological functions.
Piccinini claims that “[i]n order to know which of the computations that are implemented by a computing mechanism is explanatory in a context, we need to know the relevant relations between computations and contexts. Therefore, we cannot determine which computation is explanatory within a context without looking outside the mechanism. (…) Computations have effects on, and are affected by, their context.” (2008, 231). See also Bechtel (2009) who argues that mechanistic explanations, in general, should look around, and Miłkowski (2017) who contends that environmental factors often constrain the functions that the mechanism computes.
We note, however, that Kaplan might be an internalist about computation as he also writes that “[c]omputational models must describe the real structure of the computational mechanisms underlying the input–output mapping in order to explain.” (368). If the mechanisms underlying the input-output mapping are all internal, then there is no need to appeal to contextual factors at all.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (G-1257-116.4/2014; recipients: Jens Harbecke, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, and Oron Shagrir). We would like to thank Dimitri Coelho Mollo, Joseph Dewhurst, Lotem Elber-Dorozko, Ori Hacohen, Shahar Hechtlinger, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, David Kaplan, Jan Philipp Köster, Arnon Levy, Gualtiero Piccinini, Bill Bechtel and Carlos Zednik for valuable feedback on our paper during several meetings during the course of the GIF project 'Causation and Computation in Cognitive Neuroscience'. We would also like to thank Zehava Cohen for her help in developing the illustrations.
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Harbecke, J., Shagrir, O. The role of the environment in computational explanations. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 9, 37 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-019-0263-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-019-0263-7