Connectionist approaches, Andy Clark argues, are driving cognitive                  science toward a radical reconception of its explanatory endeavor. At the heart of                  this reconception lies a shift toward a new and more deeply developmental vision of                  the mind - a vision that has important implications for the philosophical and                  psychological understanding of the nature of concepts, of mental causation, and of                  representational change.Combining philosophical argument, empirical results, and                  interdisciplinary speculations, Clark charts a fundamental shift from a static,                  inner-code-oriented conception of the subject matter of cognitive science to a more                  dynamic, developmentally rich, process-oriented view. Clark argues that this shift                  makes itself felt in two main ways. First, structured representations are seen as                  the products of temporally extended cognitive activity and not as the                  representational bedrock (an innate symbol system or language of thought) upon which                  all learning is based. Second, the relation between thoughts (as described by folk                  psychology) and inner computational states is loosened as a result of the fragmented                  and distributed nature of the connectionist representation of concepts.Other issues                  Clark raises include the nature of innate knowledge, the conceptual commitments of                  folk psychology, and the use and abuse of higher-level analyses of connectionist                  networks.Andy Clark is Reader in Philosophy of Cognitive Sciences in the School of                  Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex, in England. He's the                  author of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed                  Processing.

Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change (Bradford Books) PDF

The list of books you might like