Abstract
My paper is about a single problem: whether New Connectionism can provide a deeper understanding of simple forms of learning than either Behaviorism or Discrepancy Theory.1 It is a problem which should interest anyone inclined to wonder, as I do, about the prospects of connectionism as a basis for the psychology of human and animal learning, that is, to wonder whether learning is in general a connectionist process. What are the key issues, principles, data that lie behind the study of simple learning? What does connectionism say about these topics? How does the connectionist approach compare with alternative approaches: How may we decide whether connectionism is preferable to alternative approaches? A chief advantage of focusing on simple learning is that the insights gained may be cumulative and apply when complex forms of learning are studied, although except for some speculative remarks at the end of the paper, I shall have nothing to say about complex learning in this paper.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Graham, G. (1991). Connectionism in Pavlovian Harness. In: Horgan, T., Tienson, J. (eds) Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3524-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3524-5_7
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