Cognitive Modelling: A Language Game of Situated Cultural Practices
Inês Hipólito
Macquarie University, Philosophy Department and Berlin School of Mind and Brain (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
June 15, 2023, 1 p.m. UTC // June 15, 2023, 1 p.m. in UTC
This paper defends that from macroscale human computation, it does not follow that microscale processes involve ontological properties of macroscale computation. Section 1 critically assesses and rejects computational realism, i.e. realism about computational models. Section 2 defends that beyond the mind-machine analogy, there is a more suited analogy for epistemic understanding of cognitive behaviour. Section 3, drawing from radical enactivism, builds theory characterising computation, including computational modelling, as a sophisticated human activity that requires enculturated full agency and skilled training. Computational modelling depends upon enactive cultural practices allowing for developing and employing diverse kinds of computational language games to understand neurobiological systems. Section 4, then, employs one kind: complex systems theory is a suited modelling formalism for systems neurobiology and its emerging enactive cultural human practices such as computation, and specifically, scientific computational modelling as means of understanding micro-scale neurobiological systems.
