Introduction

Computational approaches to explain how the mind works have bloomed in the last three decades. The idea that computing can explain thinking emerged in the early modern period, but its impact on the philosophy and sciences of the mind and brain owes much to the groundbreaking work of Alan Turing on the foundations of both mathematical computation theory and artificial intelligence (e.g. Turing, 1936; 1950). Turing’s work set the stage for the computational theory of mind (CTM), which, classically understood, claims that thinking is a computational process defined over linguistically structured representations.