TY - JOUR
T1 - Connectionism and the language of thought
AU - Rowlands, Mark
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 1994/6
Y1 - 1994/6
N2 - In an influential critique, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn point to the existence of a potentially devastating dilemma for connectionism (Fodor and Pylyshyn [1988]). Either connectionist models consist in mere associations of unstructured representations, or they consist in processes involving complex representations. If the former, connectionism is mere associationism, and will not be capable of accounting for very much of cognition. If the latter, then connectionist models concern only the implementation of cognitive processes, and are, therefore, not informative at the level of cognition. I shall argue that Fodor and Pylyshyn's argument is based on a crucial misunderstanding, the same misunderstanding which motivates the entire language of thought hypothesis.
AB - In an influential critique, Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn point to the existence of a potentially devastating dilemma for connectionism (Fodor and Pylyshyn [1988]). Either connectionist models consist in mere associations of unstructured representations, or they consist in processes involving complex representations. If the former, connectionism is mere associationism, and will not be capable of accounting for very much of cognition. If the latter, then connectionist models concern only the implementation of cognitive processes, and are, therefore, not informative at the level of cognition. I shall argue that Fodor and Pylyshyn's argument is based on a crucial misunderstanding, the same misunderstanding which motivates the entire language of thought hypothesis.
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U2 - 10.1093/bjps/45.2.485
DO - 10.1093/bjps/45.2.485
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:58349089683
VL - 45
SP - 485
EP - 503
JO - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
JF - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
SN - 0007-0882
IS - 2
ER -