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Connection Science, 4, 227-252, 1992.
Connectionism, Learning and Meaning
Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater
Abstract
There is an apparent anomaly in the notion that connectionism, which
is fundamentally a new technology, has considerable
philosophical significance. Nonetheless, connectionism
has been widely viewed as having implications for symbol grounding,
notions of structured representation and compositionality, as well as
the issue of nativism. In this paper, we consider each of these issues
in detail, and find that the current state of connectionism does not
warrant the magnitude of many of the philosophical conclusions drawn
from it. We argue that connectionist models are no more ``grounded''
than their classical counterparts. In addition, since connectionist
representations typically are ascribed content through semantic
interpretation based on correlation, connectionism is prone to a
number of well-known philosophical problems facing any kind of
correlational semantics. However, we suggest that philosophy may be
ill-advised to ignore the development of connectionism, particularly
if connectionist systems prove to be able to learn to handle
structured representations.
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