Cognitive Science in the Post-foundational Era: An Introduction

The quest for foundations is a natural enough preoccupation for anyone concerned with the nature and conditions of knowledge.The epistemologist and the cognitive scientist alike have long shared the basic working assumption that knowledge in all its myriad forms can be constructed in a systematic, rule-governed way from some common basis.This assumption of foundationalism seems indeed to provide an essential condition for even constituting issues of knowledge as a well-defined, selfcontained domain of inquiry.In cognitive science, foundationalism finds its most direct expression in the classical perspective of the computational theory of mind.This refers to the now familiar idea that minds, like conventional computers, are instances of universal symbol processing machines, viz., devices capable of carrying out any finitely specifiable effectively computable function.Universal machines, as implemented in actual physical devices, form the broad class of systems called physical symbol systems (Newell, 1980), hence the well known formulation of the computational theory of mind as the physical symbol system hypothesis: "The hypothesis is that humans are instances of physical symbol systems and, by virtue of this, mind enters into the physical universe" (Newell, 1980, p. 136).The plausibility of the hypothesis rests to a great extent on the notion of an effectively computable function, something which not only circumscribes the functional capabilities of physical symbol systems, but 205 Volume 4, Nos.[3][4] 1994 Cognitive Science in the Post-foundational Era:

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