Killeen Peter R
Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona.
Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2001 Aug;10(4):136-140. doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.00134.
Comprehension of a phenomenon involves identifying its origin, structure, substrate, and function, and representing these factors in some formal system. Aristotle provided a clear specification of these kinds of explanation, which he called efficient causes (triggers), formal causes (models), material causes (substrates or mechanisms), and final causes (functions). In this article, Aristotle's framework is applied to conditioning and the computation-versus-association debate. The critical empirical issue is early versus late reduction of information to disposition. Automata theory provides a grammar for models of conditioning and information processing in which that constraint can be represented.
对一种现象的理解涉及确定其起源、结构、基础和功能，并在某种形式系统中呈现这些因素。亚里士多德对这些解释类型给出了清晰的说明，他将其称为动力因（触发因素）、形式因（模型）、质料因（基础或机制）和目的因（功能）。在本文中，亚里士多德的框架被应用于条件作用以及计算与联想的争论。关键的实证问题是信息向倾向的早期还是晚期简化。自动机理论为条件作用和信息处理模型提供了一种语法，在这种语法中可以表示该约束。
