PDP and Symbol Manipulation
PDP and Symbol Manipulation
What's Been Learned Since 1986?
One of the most fascinating ideas ever to emerge from cognitive science was the notion that the mind, unlike digital computers, might proceed entirely without recourse to symbol-manipulation. But how tenable is that intriguing idea, 25 years later? Fodor and Pylyshyn challenged it immediately; I argue that so-called “eliminative connectionism” never made as much progress as its authors might hope. Instead, there continues to be good reason to believe that minds have, among other capacities, a neurally realized way of representing symbols, variables, and operations over variables, and have the resources to distinguish types from tokens and to represent ordered pairs and structured units. After a quarter century, advocates of eliminative connectionism have yet to mount an adequate alternative. A more profitable endeavor might be to figure out how to use networks of neurons in systems that unify symbols and statistics, rather than needlessly treating them as antithetical.
Keywords: Symbol manipulation, Eliminative connectionism, Syntactic trees
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