Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Architecture

Phenomenology as Proto-Computationalism: Do the Prolegomena Indicate a Computational Reading of the Logical Investigations?

“…From a Husserlian "point of view," Dreyfus contended, "Fodor is rediscovering a very important discipline: the phenomenological theory of cognition, which Hume and Kant saw dimly and which Husserl brought into its own" ( 15). This answer, however, proved to be very unpopular (though see Pokropski 2020), and was immediately rejected by Husserlians, both before (McIntyre, 1986) and after (Brown, 1990; Woodruff Smith, 1995, 342) the discovery of the potential of neural networks as an explanatory apparatus for cognitive phenomena (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986;Smolensky, 1991).…”

“…From a Husserlian "point of view," Dreyfus contended, "Fodor is rediscovering a very important discipline: the phenomenological theory of cognition, which Hume and Kant saw dimly and which Husserl brought into its own" ( 15). This answer, however, proved to be very unpopular (though see Pokropski 2020), and was immediately rejected by Husserlians, both before (McIntyre, 1986) and after (Brown, 1990; Woodruff Smith, 1995, 342) the discovery of the potential of neural networks as an explanatory apparatus for cognitive phenomena (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986;Smolensky, 1991).In light of the newfound promise of multilayer networks, and without heeding the warnings of the rediscoverer of phenomenological cognition (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988), the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences was born. The guiding framework for the journal was established by the work of Varela, Thompson, and…”