Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is a certain worry about computational information processing explanations which occasionally arises. It takes the following general form: The informational content of computational systems is not genuine. It is ascribed to the system by an external observer. But if this is the case, why can't it be ascribed to any system? And if it can be ascribed to any system, then surely it is a vacuous notion for explanatory purposes. I respond to this worry by arguing that not every system can be accurately described as a computational information processing system.