Functionalism (philosophy of mind)

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution. But rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part.

History

This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine. But it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states.[1]

References

Levin, Janet (2018). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.

[1] Levin, Janet (2018). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.