Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

and strong equivalence are reviewed, with the latter serving as the primary goal of
classical cognitive science.
To say that two systems—such as a simulation and a human subject—are
strongly equivalent is to say that both are solving the same information processing
problem, using the same algorithm, based on the same architecture. Establishing
strong equivalence requires collecting behavioural evidence of the types introduced
in Chapter 2 (relative complexity, intermediate state, and error evidence) to reverse
engineer a subject’s algorithm. It also requires discovering the components of a
subject’s architecture, which involves behavioural evidence concerning cognitive
impenetrability as well as biological evidence about information processing in the
brain (e.g., evidence about which areas of the brain might be viewed as being information
processing modules). In general, the search for strong equivalence by classical
cognitive scientists involves conducting a challenging research program that can
be described as functional analysis or reverse engineering.
The reverse engineering in which classical cognitive scientists are engaged
involves using a variety of research methods adopted from many different disciplines.
This is because this research strategy explores cognition at all four levels
of investigation (computational, algorithmic, architectural, and implementational)
that were introduced in Chapter 2. The current chapter is organized in a fashion
that explores computational issues first, and then proceeds through the remaining
levels to end with some considerations about implementational issues of importance
to classical cognitive science.
3.1 Mind, Disembodied
In the seventh century, nearly the entire Hellenistic world had been conquered
by Islam. The Greek texts of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle had already
been translated into Syriac; the new conquerors translated these texts into Arabic
(Kuhn, 1957). Within two centuries, these texts were widely available in educational
institutions that ranged from Baghdad to Cordoba and Toledo. By the tenth century,
Latin translations of these Arabic texts had made their way to Europe. Islamic
civilization “preserved and proliferated records of ancient Greek science for later
European scholars” (Kuhn, 1957, p. 102).
The availability of the ancient Greek texts gave rise to scholasticism in Europe
during the middle ages. Scholasticism was central to the European universities that
arose in the twelfth century, and worked to integrate key ideas of Greek philosophy
into the theology of the Church. During the thirteenth century, scholasticism
achieved its zenith with the analysis of Aristotle’s philosophy by Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas.
56 Chapter 3