Computation, Gender, and Human Thinking

What is called thinking? Since Heidegger drew attention to this question in the early part of the twentieth century, our answers to it have become both remarkably complex and, at the same time, surprisingly univocal. ¹ The modern computer came into being just after Heidegger posed the question, yet implicit in the computer revolution is the notion that thinking itself is equivalent to the logical manipulation of discrete symbols. Whether this activity, call it computation for short, comprises all that is thinking or just a significant part of it, remains a live topic within much of contemporary philosophy, computer science, cognitive science, and linguistics. Yet the assumption that thinking is computation in some significant way is rarely questioned. That this assumption caught fire in the 1950s, just as (and just where) the first computers that could actually carry on significant tasks were being built, remains outside the purview of mainstream philosophical speculation. Today, the bulk of work that is called philosophical in the English-speaking world is dedicated to adumbrating the ways in which human thinking can be said to be a computational process. Less prominent but no less interesting strands of thought raise (often tentative) doubts.

It is no accident that the work of the most prominent thinkers in late-twentieth-century mainstream philosophy—W. V. Quine, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Hilary Putnam—are engaged in a series of struggles that are explicitly about computation and even more explicitly about the role of so-called logical form in cognitive practice, especially in language. Seen this way, their work exists in a clear continuum with earlier philosophers, including Husserl, Russell, and especially the early Wittgenstein and the so-called logical positivists. Wittgenstein is most significant because he accepted and then dissented from the view that logical form represents cognitive practice (the former in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the latter in the Philosophical Investigations and other later works) and thus went from an analytic-style philosophical practice to a much more apparently deconstructive one, a turn that continues to haunt analytic philosophy. Alan Turing is important for much the opposite reason: believing that logical form does in fact represent human intelligence to a significant degree, he found a way to reify logical form in the most profound way, giving birth to a thing that could by definition only follow logical precepts. He said this thing could think, or would shortly, and gave us what he said was a way to know whether it was thinking. How mistaken he was about this is clear now, but the consequences of his mistake have been widely underappreciated.

Intelligence

It is curious and not accidental that the persons most directly responsible for theorizing the computer revolution are also the ones directly responsible for building the first computers. Prior to the 1950s, it was not clear to anyone just what a computer was, or could be; there was a generic interest in speculative literature in various kinds of mechanical "thinking machines," but the faith that modern technology could produce a machine that in fact performed some part of human intellectual work was shared by only a few mathematicians and logicians. In other words, while to the general public, human thinking was relatively undifferentiated, to these thinkers, cognition was divided into a logical component and what, for the moment, we can call its nonlogical components. Few efforts were made to disentangle these facets of cognition, since the main interest was in understanding logic as an inherent feature of rationality. So, while the efforts of famous logicians like Russell, Husserl, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein in the early part of the twentieth century appeared to almost everyone else as exercises in the philosophical specification of rationality, to thinkers like Turing and von Neumann they served as blueprints for a kind of universal reasoning that, once understood in the abstract, simply became an object in the real world as well. This object, even today...