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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1994 45(2):485-503; doi:10.1093/bjps/45.2.485
© 1994 by British Society for the Philosophy of Science
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Connectionism and the Language of Thought

MARK ROWLANDS

Department of Philosophy, The University of Alabama Tuscalousa, Alabama

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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