THE VERY IDEA OF MACHINE-STATE FUNCTIONALISM The early functionalist theories of Putnam(1960, 1967) can be seen as a response to the difficulties facing behaviorism as a scientific psychological theory, and as an endorsement of the(new) computational theories of mind which were becoming increasingly significant rivals to it. According to Putnams machine state functionalism any creature with a mind can be regarded as a Turing machine(an idealized finite state digital computer) whose operation can be fully specified by a set of instructions(a machine table or program) each having the form If the machine is in state S, and receives input I, it will go into state Sk and produce output O, (for a finite number of states, inputs and outputs A machine table of this sort describes the operation of a deterministic automaton, but most machine state functionalists(e. g. Putnam 1967)take the proper model for the mind to be that of a probabilistic automaton: one in which the program specifies, for each state and set of inputs, the probability with which the machine will enter some subsequent state and produce some particular output.THE VERY IDEA OF MACHINE-STATE FUNCTIONALISM  The early functionalist theories of Putnam (1960, 1967) can be seen as a response to the difficulties facing behaviorism as a scientific psychological theory, and as an endorsement of the (new) computational theories of mind which were becoming increasingly significant rivals to it. According to Putnam's machine state functionalism, any creature with a mind can be regarded as a Turing machine (an idealized finite state digital computer), whose operation can be fully specified by a set of instructions (a “machine table” or program) each having the form:  If the machine is in state Si , and receives input Ij , it will go into state Sk and produce output Ol (for a finite number of states, inputs and outputs).  A machine table of this sort describes the operation of a deterministic automaton, but most machine state functionalists (e.g. Putnam 1967) take the proper model for the mind to be that of a probabilistic automaton: one in which the program specifies, for each state and set of inputs, the probability with which the machine will enter some subsequent state and produce some particular output