Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Marr’s levels of analysis constitute one influential approach tothe central program of cognitive science—the multilevel anal-ysis of cognition as information processing. The distinctiveaspects of Marr’s framework are an emphasis on identifyingthe computational problems and constraints faced in cognition,and conceptual machinery to relate cognitive mechanisms tothat computational level of analysis. Although related ideashave been explored in a range of social science disciplines,Marr’s framework, and particularly its notion of the preciseformulation of computational problems and solutions, has yetto be applied widely in social analysis. In the present workwe develop a formulation of Marr’s levels for social systems,provide examples of this approach, and address potential criti-cisms. The consequence is a computational perspective on thesociological school of structural functionalism, and an appara-tus for conducting multiscale analysis of social systems.