Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Mind
Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot
Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
What might we learn if we take seriously the possibility of non-human Languages of Thought (LoT)? A LoT is a combinatorial set of mental representations. And, since mental representations and rules of combination vary in kind, there are many possible LoTs. Simple LoTs might lack familiar features of the putative human LoT, such as object representations, recursively defined rules of combination, sentential connectives, or predicate-argument structure. The most familiar arguments for the existence of LoTs, such as those from productivity, systematicity, concept learning, and perceptual computation, all fail when applied to non-human animals. But recent empirical evidence motivates attributing LoTs …
A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer
A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Connectionism is an approach to neural-networks-based cognitive modeling that encompasses the recent deep learning movement in artificial intelligence. It came of age in the 1980s, with its roots in cybernetics and earlier attempts to model the brain as a system of simple parallel processors. Connectionist models center on statistical inference within neural networks with empirically learnable parameters, which can be represented as graphical models. More recent approaches focus on learning and inference within hierarchical generative models. Contra influential and ongoing critiques, I argue in this dissertation that the connectionist approach to cognitive science possesses in principle (and, as is becoming …