Language of Thought: The Connectionist Contribution

• Authors: Murat Aydede
• Venue: Minds and Machines
• Year: 1997

Fodor and Pylyshyn‘s critique of connectionism has posed a challenge toconnectionists: Adequately explain such nomological regularities assystematicity and productivity without postulating a "language of thought"(LOT). Some connectionists like Smolensky took the challenge very seriously,and attempted to meet it by developing models that were supposed to benon-classical. At the core of these attempts lies the claim thatconnectionist models can provide a representational system with acombinatorial syntax and processes sensitive to syntactic structure. Theyare not implementation models because, it is claimed, the way they obtainsyntax and structure sensitivity is not "concatenative," hence "radicallydifferent" from the way classicists handle them. In this paper, I offer ananalysis of what it is to physically satisfy/realize a formal system. Inthis context, I examine the minimal truth-conditions of LOT Hypothesis. Frommy analysis it will follow that concatenative realization of formal systemsis irrelevant to LOTH since the very notion of LOT is indifferent to such animplementation level issue as concatenation. I will conclude that to theextent to which they can explain the law-like cognitive regularities, acertain class of connectionist models proposed as radical alternatives tothe classical LOT paradigm will in fact turn out to be LOT models, eventhough new and potentially very exciting ones.