Online research in philosophy

A comment the paper by Brian McLaughlin in the same volume, this paper raises questions about whether the classicism/connectionism debate is really well-formed.

This paper responds to criticisms levelled by Fodor, Pylyshyn, and McLaughlin against connectionism. Specifically, I will rebut the charge that connectionists cannot account for representational systematicity without implementing a classical architecture. This will be accomplished by drawing on Paul Smolensky's Tensor Product model of representation and on his insights about split-level architectures.

Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) have argued that the cognitive architecture is not Connectionist. Their argument takes the following form: (1) the cognitive architecture is Classical; (2) Classicalism and Connectionism are incompatible; (3) therefore the cognitive architecture is not Connectionist. In this essay I argue that Fodor and Pylyshyn's defenses of (1) and (2) are inadequate. Their argument for (1), based on their claim that Classicalism best explains the systematicity of cognitive capacities, is an invalid instance of inference to the best explanation. And their argument for (2) turns out to be question-begging. The upshot is that, while Fodor and Pylyshyn have presented Connectionists with the important empirical challenge of explaining systematicity, they have failed to provide sufficient reason for inferring that the cognitive architecture is Classical and not Connectionist.