claims for the theory to reason causation

CTM rose to prominence as one of the most important theories of mind in the 1980s. This may in part have been due to the intuitive attention of the computer metaphor, which played upon the notion of a technology that was rapidly gaining public recognition and technological applications.

By this time, moreover, the computer had influenced the understanding of the mind through the influence some projects in the sciences of cognition and in artificial intelligence, where researchers sought to endow machines with human-level competences in reasoning, language, problem-solving and perception, though not always by replicating the mechanisms by which these are performed in humans.

In addition, CTM's advocates also claimed that it provided solutions to several important philosophical problems, and its plausibility in these areas was an important contributor to its rapid rise to popularity.

The most important philosophical benefit claimed for CTM was that it purported to show how reasoning could be a non-mysterious sort of causal process, and could nonetheless be sensitive to semantic relations between judgments. The background problem here was the received view that reasons are not causes. On the one hand, it is hard to see how a purely causal process could proceed on the basis of the semantic values of propositions.

To posit a mechanism that understood the meanings of mental symbols would in effect be to posit a little interpreter or homunculus inside the head, and then the same problems of coordinating reason and causation would recur for the homunculus, resulting in a regress of interpreters. On the other hand, it is hard to see how a process specified in purely causal terms could thereby count as a reasoning process, as calling something "reasoning" locates it with respect to norms and not merely to causes. ( That is , to call a process "rational" is not merely to describe its causal etiology, but to say that it meets, or at least is evaluable by, certain standards of reasoning, such as validity.)

CTM的理論在電腦技術發展起來之後，被我們的心靈理論所重視。大概是因為電腦這個科技背後所隱含的意義，包括了我們在直覺上運用心智與認知的技術的科技和能力所導致吧。時至今日，電腦科學已經廣泛被理解，認知科學家在研究人工智慧時，關注著電腦與人類操作語言、理性、解決問題與感覺的差異，雖然電腦做出的這類事情仍不及人類。

CTM在研究理性的議題上使得我們脫離那種虛而不實的理解。而且逐漸理解語意與判斷的關聯。這背後的問題是，理性的研究不等於因果關係的研究。也就是說，無法純粹由理解因果關係的運作來理解命題中最基本的語意值的運作。我們研究命題中的因果關係並無助益於我們去理解理性的運作，因為我們關注的是辭彙理解，而不是因果鏈。好比說，一個理性的決策過程與描繪一個病理的因果關係並無不同，但是，至少意義上可以這麼說，一個確定的理性模型就是一個確定的因果關係模型，例如有效性的模型。