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Networks with attitudes

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Abstract

Does connectionism spell doom for folk psychology? I examine the proposal that cognitive representational states such as beliefs can play no role if connectionist models—interpreted as radical new cognitive theories—take hold and replace other cognitive theories. Though I accept that connectionist theories are radical theories that shed light on cognition, I reject the conclusion that neural networks do not represent. Indeed, I argue that neural networks may actually give us a better working notion of cognitive representational states such as beliefs, and in so doing give us a better understanding of how these states might be instantiated in neural wetware.

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Notes

  1. Earlier arguments that folk psychology is a theory can be found in Sellars (1956) and Churchland (1981).

  2. A similar point about the ubiquitousness of distributed representations is made in van Gelder (1991).

  3. See, for example, Dretske (1988), or Papineau (1987).

  4. Clark and Toribio (1994) offer an account of representational encoding at the level of hidden-unit activation. However, it is left undetermined in their formulation just what propositional content might be encoded by these units. This problem is overcome in the current proposal by including input activations as part of B.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Jay McClelland, Jeff Yoshimi, and Jesús Navarro for helpful comments and advice. I would also like to thank David Rumelhart for originally introducing me to the issues examined here.

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  1. Symbolic Systems, Stanford University, Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, Stanford, CA, 94305-2150, USA

    Paul Skokowski

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  1. Paul Skokowski
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Correspondence to Paul Skokowski.

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Skokowski, P. Networks with attitudes. AI & Soc 23, 461–470 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0175-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-007-0175-5

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