The triviality “account” examined

Abstract

In the present chapter, we examine the views of two well-known and influential philosophers concerning the ubiquitous character of concrete computation. They both share a common objective, namely, the falsification of the computationa list thesis that cognition is computational. But in order to accomplish this objective, they in effect undermine the demarcation of digital computation as a subject matter. For, by their lights, there is no fact of the matter about what digital computation is. On their view, every physical object implements any number of programs and, hence, computes every Turing-computable function.