Connectionism And The Issues Of Compositionality And Systematicity

Abstract

Connectionism as a model of the mind has been attacked by the advocators of the classical paradigm, who claim that Connectionism can only work if it is an implementation of Classical representations. This could be true for some of the models that claim to be Connectionist, but it will in this paper be shown that this is not true for Connectionist architectures that use non-symbolic representations. We will provide evidence in the form of simulation results that severely weaken of the arguments raised by Fodor and Pylyshyn and Fodor and McLaughlin, including their two main arguments, which are the lack of compositionality and systematicity. 1 INTRODUCTION It has been argued that Connectionist models of the mind are mere implementations of Classical models, which are characterised, according to Fodor and Pylyshyn [1], by, 1) Combinatorial syntax and semantics for mental representations... in which (a) there is a distinction between structurally atomic and structurally molecular..