Holistic Computation: Reconstructing a Muddled Concept

It has been claimed that connectionist methods of encoding compositional structures, such as Pollack's RAAM, support a non-classical form of structure sensitive operation known as holistic computation, where symbol structures can be acted upon holistically without the need to decompose them, or to perform a search to locate or access their constituents. In this paper, it is argued that the concept as described in the literature is vague and confused, and a revised deenition of holistic computation is proposed which aims to clarify the issues involved. It is also argued that holistic computation neither requires a highly distributed or holistic representation, nor is unique to connectionist methods of representing compositional structure.