Online research in philosophy

Recently some philosophers have urged that connectionist artificial intelligence is (potentially) eliminative for the propositional attitudes of folk psychology. At the same time, however, these philosophers have also insisted that since philosophy of science has failed to provide criteria distinguishing ontologically retentive from eliminative theory changes, the resulting eliminativism is not principled. Application of some resources developed within the semantic view of scientific theories, particularly recent formal work on the theory reduction relation, reveals these philosophers to be wrong in this second contention, yet by and large correct in the first.

In this paper I critically examine the line of reasoning that has recently appeared in the literature that connects connectionism with eliminativism. This line of reasoning has it that if connectionist models turn out accurately to characterize our cognition, then beliefs, desires and the other intentional entities of commonsense psychology will be eliminated from our theoretical ontology. In complete contrast I argue (1) that not only is this line of reasoning mistaken about the eliminativist tendencies of connectionist models, but (2) that these models have the potential to provide a more robust vindication of commonsense psychology than classical computational models.