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Relating Bayes to cognitive mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2011

Mitchell Herschbach  and
William Bechtel
Mitchell Herschbach
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119. mherschb@ucsd.eduhttp://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~mitchbill@mechanism.ucsd.eduhttp://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill
William Bechtel
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119. mherschb@ucsd.eduhttp://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~mitchbill@mechanism.ucsd.eduhttp://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill
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Abstract

We support Enlightenment Bayesianism's commitment to grounding Bayesian analysis in empirical details of psychological and neural mechanisms. Recent philosophical accounts of mechanistic science illuminate some of the challenges this approach faces. In particular, mechanistic decomposition of mechanisms into their component parts and operations gives rise to a notion of levels distinct from and more challenging to accommodate than Marr's.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , August 2011 , pp. 202 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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