Computational Psychology and Interpretation Theory
Hilary Putnam · 2018
Computer scientists working in &s;artificial intelligence&s;, and cognitive psychologists thinking about reference, semantic representation, language use, and so on, have a little more specific hypothesis in mind than the almost empty hypothesis that the mind can be modelled by a digital computer. This chapter shows that it may be possible to give a complete functionalist psychology, including a complete verificationist semantics for mentalese, without in any way solving the problem of interpretation, or even the problem of reference-preserving translation. Davidson should have spelled out a little more explicitly, there is no reason to think that the availability of a &s;cerebroscope&s; which enabled to directly read off the subject&s;s &s;mentalese&s; could make things any better. Davidson&s;s point is that what is true of public language is almost certainly going to be true of any &s;mental representations&s; or salient neurological states which stand causally behind public language.