Abstract
The paper seeks to clarify some conceptual issues raised by contemporary connectionism, and its relation to classical computationalism, by means of a comparative study of the major features of early, ’paleo’-connectionism, and late, ’neo’-connectionism. An examination of the celebrated inaugural paper by McCulloch and Pitts (1943) reveals a deep ambivalence: their neural nets are presented both as ’logic machines’ and as neural near-equivalents of Turing machines. It is shown that the lack of an intrinsic, ’embodied’ representational level prevents these nets from attaining real logical powers, while as computational devices they herald contemporary computationalism in both classical and connectionist forms, but leave its representational face entirely in the dark.
Connectionism really gets off the ground with the first attempts at modelling perception, in the 1947 paper by Pitts and McCulloch on perceptual invariants, and in Rosenblatt’s work on perceptions. But it is only with the introduction of a representational level that connectionism breaks out of the narrow confines of perception proper: this, more perhaps than the well-known technical innovations, is the hallmark of neo-connectionism and may allow it to account for higher cognitive processes. However, the notion of representation at work in Parallel Distributed Processing(PDP)-style connectionism remains closely tied to the classical one, and thus unexplicated. The recent attempts, within the ’attractor neural net’ school, to account for intrinsic representation, may give connectionism, of which the deep unity through changes is upheld, its own proper foundations.
The present paper grew out of talks given in 1987 in Jerusalem (Mishkenot Sha’ahanim workshop on “Minds and Machines”, April), Cerisy-la-Salle (conference on “Approches de la cognition”, June) and Ghent (conference on “Communication and Cognition — Applied Epistemology”, December).
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Andler, D. (1992). From Paleo- to Neo-Connectionism. In: van de Vijver, G. (eds) New Perspectives on Cybernetics. Synthese Library, vol 220. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8062-5_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8062-5_8
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