Online research in philosophy

In this paper I shall compare two models of concept formation, both inspired by basic convictions of philosophical empiricism. The first, the connectionist model, will be exemplified by Kohonen maps, and the second will be my own dynamic theory of concept formation. Both can be understood in probabilistic terms, both use a notion of convergence or stabilization in modelling how concepts are built up. Both admit destabilization of concepts and conceptual change. Both do not use a notion of representation in some pregiven language, such as a language of thought or some logical language. Representation in a formal language only plays a role on the meta-level, namely within the theory about concept formation.

Traditionally, theories of concepts in psychology assume that concepts are a single, uniform kind of mental representation. But no single kind of representation can explain all of the empirical data for which concepts are responsible. I argue that the assumption that concepts are uniformly the same kind of mental structure is responsible for these theories’ shortcomings, and outline a pluralist theory of concepts that rejects this assumption. On pluralism, concepts should be thought of as being constituted by multiple representational kinds, with the particular kind of concept used on an occasion being determined by the context. I argue that endorsing pluralism does not lead to eliminativism about concepts as an object of scientific interest.

This paper presents considerations in favour of the view that traditional (classical) architectures can be seen as emergent features of connectionist networks with distributed representation. A recent paper by William Bechtel (1988) which argues for a similar conclusion is unsatisfactory in that it fails to consider whether the compositional syntax and semantics attributed to mental representations by classical models can emerge within a connectionist network. The compatibility of the two paradigms hinges largely, I suggest, on how this question is answered. Focusing on the issue of syntax, I argue that while such structure is lacking in connectionist models with local representation, it can be accommodated within networks where representation is distributed. I discuss an important paper by Smolenski (1988) which attempts to show how connectionists can incorporate the relevant syntactic structure, suggesting that some criticisms levelled against that paper by Fodor & Pylyshyn (1988) are wanting. I then go on to indicate a strategy by which a compositional syntax and semantics can be defined for the sort of network that Smolenski describes. I conclude that since the connectionist can respect the central tenets of classicism, the two approaches are compatible with one another.

The nature of complex concepts has important implications for the computational modelling of the mind, as well as for the cognitive science of concepts. This paper outlines the way in which RVC – a Relational View of Concepts – accommodates a range of complex concepts, cases which have been argued to be non-compositional. RVC attempts to integrate a number of psychological, linguistic and psycholinguistic considerations with the situation-theoretic view that information-carrying relations hold only relative to background situations. The central tenet of RVC is that the content of concepts varies systematically with perspective. The analysis of complex concepts indicates that compositionality too should be considered to be sensitive to perspective. Such a view accords with concepts and mental states being situated and the implications for theories of concepts and for computational models of the mind are discussed.

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.

These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive ...