Abstract
Marr's account of the analysis of complex information-processing tasks as having three levels — the levels of computational theory, representation and algorithm, and hardware implementation — is reconsidered. I argue that the notion of “level” here runs together two distinctive sort of explanatory shifts — that of grain and that of contextual function. I then offer a revision of the account which avoids this problem, and suggest how this might play a role in the practice of theory evaluation.
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McClamrock, R. Marr's three levels: A re-evaluation. Minds and Machines 1, 185–196 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00361036
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00361036