The Origin And Contemporary Development Of Cognitive Computationalism

Because of the electronic computer's birth and quick spread, the people's life style has been largely changed and it provides a new visual angle and method for people to understand themselves. For nearly half a century, along with the naissance and development of some subjects, such as cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the cognitive computationalism, a research program, which claims the essence of cognition is computation, has come into being. At present this research program occupies the mainstream in some fields like cognitive science and artificial intelligence and makes a new progress. The paper mainly tries to expound its power, soft spot and philosophical significance, through reviewing the cognitive computationalism's history and contemporary development.In the first part the paper describes and analyses the original ideas. The ideas' history can be traced back to the philosophers of 17th century. Leibniz invented binary system and assumed a "universal characteristic", a symbol system that contained all the human thoughts; the "mechanical reasoner" that he invented contains the ideas, namely reasoning is a deduction system based on formal rule. Until the 19th century Boole invented Boolean algebra, the deduction reasoning process became computing process. So mind was analogized to be mechanism and reasoning process was computation, which are the original core ideas.In the second part the paper describes the form background of present cognitive computationalism. From the thirties of the 20th century along with the great progress of cognitive level of computation from intuition to logical analysis, computation became an object, split with the physical realizer, which leads to the notion of computation take off in two disparate directions, the "theoretical" and "practical" routes. In the "theoretical" route Turing constructed an abstract math model, namely Turing Machine, to settle determinant questions. Turing machine takes the intuition conception of feasible computability into strict formality and the "Church-Turing Thesis" that "any feasible computability function is universal Turing machine computability" is come into being. In the "practical" route, as computing devices go on progress, from mechanical to electric, especially the birth of electronic computer, computer machine gets great progress in computing speed, capacity and representative languages. It enlarges the conception of computation and also provides a new tool for people to realize the real-world and themselves. In the third part, firstly the paper analyses the core conception of cognitive computationalism-computation. Then based on that it systematically analyses the ontology and methodology presume of cognitive science and artificial intelligence and find that the main philosophical basis of them is cognitive computational ism. Because cognition can be viewed as computation, programs can explain psychological process, and the "computer metaphor" is "Mind is to the brain as the program is to the hardware", which are justly the basic presumes of them.In the fourth part the paper discusses several main debates about cognitive computational ism, demonstrates that it is a powerful and promising research program and points out that the presume of the separate between computation and its physical realize is the soft spot. At last it turns out, on analysis, that there are some new changes in cognitive computationalism for clearing up this soft spot.The paper systematically and deeply expounds the main origin and development of the cognitive computationalism's ideas, then states the basic station of cognitive computationalism in cognitive science and artificial intelligence and in the end claims that the cognitive computationalism's research program is powerful and promising. That is the special view of this paper.