Connectionism and the philosophy of psychology

書誌事項

Connectionism and the philosophy of psychology

Terence Horgan, John Tienson

MIT Press, c1996

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注記

"A Bradford book." -- T.p

Bibliography: p. [199]-204

Includes index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

Human cognition is soft. It is too flexible, too rich, and too open-ended to be captured by hard (precise, exceptionless) rules of the sort that can constitute a computer program. In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition. In place of the classical paradigm that take the mind to be a computer (or a group of linked computers), they propose that the mind is best understood as a dynamical system realized in a neural network.Although Horgan and Tienson assert that cognition cannot be understood in classical terms of the algorithm-governed manipulation of symbols, they don't abandon syntax. Instead, they insist that human cognition is symbolic, and that cognitive processes are sensitive to the structure of symbols in the brain: the very richness of cognition requires a system of mental representations within which there are syntactically complex symbols and structure-sensitive processing.However, syntactic constituents need not be parts of complex representations, and structure sensitive processes need not conform to algorithms. Cognition requires a language of thought, but a language of thought implicated in processes that are not governed by hard rules. Instead, symbols are generated and transformed in response to interacting cognitive forces, which are determined by multiple, simultaneous, (robustly) soft constraints. Thus, cognitive processes conform to soft (ceteris paribus) laws, rather than to hard laws. Cognitive forces are subserved by, but not identical with, physical forces in a network; the organization and the interaction of cognitive forces are best understood in terms of the mathematical theory of dynamical systems.The concluding chapter elaborates the authors' proposed dynamical cognition framework.A Bradford Book

目次

  • Introduction and overview
  • the fundamental assumptions of classical cognitive science: classical cognitive science - representations and rules, Marr's framework for classical cognitive science and the basic assumptions of classicism
  • what we deny, and what we don't
  • what is wrong with classical cognitive science: Descartes - reason is a universal instrument, the potential relevance of anything to anything, Fodor's critique of classical cognitive science
  • cognitive systems as dynamical systems - a nonclassical framework for cognitive science: a general framework for cognitive science, connectionist networks and dynamical systems, deviations from classicism, the alternative framework - noncomputable dynamical cognition, conceptions of mind - a short recapitulation
  • why there still has to be a language of thought, and what that means: syntax and mental representations, the tracking argument, physical skills are not dispositions to respond, comparison with other arguments for syntax, deductive reasoning
  • mental causation without rules: defeasible causal tendencies, cognitive forces, cognition is not computation
  • standard-conception laws and soft laws: the standard conception of laws, soft laws
  • soft laws and psychological explanation: confirmability of ceteris paribus generalizations, soft laws and psychological explanation, some philosophical implications
  • noncomputable dynamical cognition: intrinsic vs. dispositional realisation of structure, cognitive forces and dynamical cognition, appropriating some classicist principles of cognitive design, adapting some connectionist principles of cognitive design, disclaimers.

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