A Defence Of Connectionism Against The "Syntactic'' Argument

Abstract

In "Representations without Rules, Connectionism and the Syntactic Argument'', Kenneth Aizawa argues against the view that connectionist nets can be understood as processing representations without the use of representation-level rules, and he provides a positive characterization of how to interpret connectionist nets as following representation-level rules. He takes Terry Horgan and John Tienson to be the targets of his critique. The present paper marshals functional and methodological considerations, gleaned from the practice of cognitive modelling, to argue against Aizawa's characterization of how connectionist nets may be understood as making use of representation-level rules.