Context and Connectionist Networks Mikael Bodén

The question whether connectionism offers a new way of looking at the cognitive architecture, or if its main contribution is as an implementational account of the classical (symbol) view, has been extensively debated for the last decade. Of special interest in this debate has been to achieve tasks which easily can be explained within the symbolic framework, i.e., tasks which seemingly require the possession of a systematicity of representation and process, in a novel way in connectionist systems. In this paper we argue that connectionism can offer a new explanational framework for aspects of cognition. Specifically, we argue that connectionism can offer new notions of compositionality, content and context-dependence based on connectionist primitives, i.e., architectures, learning, weights and internal activations, which open up for new variations of systematicity.