Concepts, connectionism, and the language of thought

In W Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 485-503 (1991)
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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a _prima facie_ tension between our commonsense conception of ourselves as thinkers and the connectionist programme for modelling cognitive processes. The language of thought hypothesis plays a pivotal role. The connectionist paradigm is opposed to the language of thought; and there is an argument for the language of thought that draws on features of the commonsense scheme of thoughts, concepts, and inference. Most of the paper (Sections 3-7) is taken up with the argument for the language of thought hypothesis. The argument for an opposition between connectionism and the language of thought comes towards the end (Section 8), along with some discussion of the potential eliminativist consequences (Sections 9 and.

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Citations of this work

Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism.John Sutton - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Thinking with maps.Elisabeth Camp - 2007 - Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1):145–182.
The language of thought hypothesis.Murat Aydede - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Externalism, architecturalism, and epistemic warrant.Martin Davies - 1998 - In Crispin Wright, Barry C. Smith & Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford University Press. pp. 321-363.

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