Internal Realism and the Computational Model of the Mind: A Realist Interpretation of Ontological Relativity

This paper aims to explore the theoretical connections between the metaphysical model of reality known as “internal realism” and the so-called “computational” model of the mind. These models seem to be incompatible, since internal realism can be interpreted as an antirealist metaphysical view—in which we can’t go beyond our conceptual schema and we can only consider reality as fiction—while the computational model of the mind can be interpreted as a reductionist anthropological view, in which the human mind is reduced to mere syntactic computation and the human brain to a mere machinery, so that—in contrast to metaphysical antirealism—a fundamental level of knowledge and reality is asserted. I maintain that this opposition is not the only philosophical option and that it rather depends on a partial and dichotomic interpretation of both models, that does not consider their possible theoretical connections. More precisely, I argue that the computational model of the mind can play an important explanatory role with respect to the ontological relativity that essentially characterizes the internal realist view.