Connectionism and the multiplicity of mind

✍ Scribed by A. Clark

• Book ID: 104637929
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 999 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0269-2821
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00139196

✦ Synopsis

Some connectionists (e.g. Smolensky, 1988) argue that classical AI models offer at best a good approximation to the fine-grained pychological truths revealed by connectionism. Likewise, some conventional AI theorists suggest that connectionism at best displays a new way of implementing the insight embodied in classical models. But the terms of the debate, I suggest, are by no means as cut and dried as such polarizations suggest. Instead, the mind may require explanation in terms of a multiplicity of virtual architectures. Both different tasks, and different aspects of that same tasks, may call for computational explanations quantifying over the operations and data-structures of different virtual machines.