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[George Lakoff]

Subject: McClelland and Turing


I agree strongly with Jay McClelland's comments about the irrelevance
of Turing computability for issues in cognitive science.
I would add one major point:

Discussions of computability in general ignore the CONTENT of what is
computed,  in particular, the content of all natural language
concepts. To me, the most important part of studies in neural
grounding of the conceptual system, is the promise it holds out for
accounting for the content of concepts, not just the form of
representations and the characteristics of computability.

As soon as discussion is directed to details of content, it becomes
clear that computability discussions get us virtually nowhere.

George Lakoff