title: The Non-Redundant Contributions of Marr's Three Levels of Analysis for Explaining Information-Processing Mechanisms.
abstract: Are all three of Marr's levels needed? Should they be kept distinct? We argue for the distinct contributions and methodologies of each level of analysis. It is important to maintain them because they provide three different perspectives required to understand mechanisms, especially information-processing mechanisms. The computational perspective provides an understanding of how a mechanism functions in broader environments that determines the computations it needs to perform (and may fail to perform). The representation and algorithmic perspective offers an understanding of how information about the environment is encoded within the mechanism and what are the patterns of organization that enable the parts of the mechanism to produce the phenomenon. The implementation perspective yields an understanding of the neural details of the mechanism and how they constrain function and algorithms. Once we adequately characterize the distinct role of each level of analysis, it is fairly straightforward to see how they relate.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego.
authors.forename: William
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Bechtel
authors.forename: Oron
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Shagrir
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D011582:Psychological Theory
keywords: Computational level; Environmental context; Marr; Mechanistic explanation; Representation and algorithmic level