Hume’s Conception of the Mind as an Instance of a Cognitive Architecture?

This paper examines the connections between David Hume’s conception of the mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. It advances a thesis that Hume’s account of mind and its faculties, as presented in the first book of A Treatise of Human Nature, can be coherently interpreted as a cognitive architecture– and further as a viable blueprint for potential computational implementation in a system of artificial cognition. Within the proposed interpretation, the epistemological and skeptical features of Hume’s thinking are suppressed, while emphasis is put on cognitive-scientific and cognitive-psychological aspects of his work. The first part of the paper discusses the notion of cognitive architectures, their typology, and their characterizing features as defined by Fodor and Pylyshyn, i.e., compositionality, systematicity, and productivity. The second part focuses on the analysis of Hume’s conception of the mind and mental faculties while arguing that it exhibits features typical of cognitive architectures. It also presents two examples of cognitive architectures inspired by the history of philosophy, thus offering further context and support for the case of Hume’s conception of the mind qua cognitive architecture. Taken together, these considerations support the relevance of the thesis that Hume’s conception of mind can be coherently interpreted as a cognitive architecture with possible computational implementation, thus showing the relevance of his conception for the field of cognitive architectonics.