Autonomy of Computational Explanation in Cognitive Science
Computing,as a scientific method,plays an important role in explaining cognitive phenomena.Re-cently,the explanatory status of computing has been questioned by some mechanists.They believe that computation as a scientific explanation is incomplete and can be integrated into mechanism explanation,so computational expla-nation does not have explanatory autonomy.However,mechanists'challenges are invalid.There are two forms of computational explanation in cognitive science:How-form and Why-form.The root cause for the questioning in the autonomy of How-form computational interpretation lies in its confusion between computational explanation and com-putational implementation.Mechanism explanation completes its explanatory task by describing the causal mecha-nism of the explained system,and it belongs to the category of causal explanation.The reason for failure that mech-anism explanation attempts to replace Why-formal calculation explanation is that many Why-form computational ex-planations use basic principles similar to mathematical explanations,which makes them unable to be integrated into any causal or causal-based explanation theory.
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