Lecture 17                                          Connectionism, PartIV

Ron Mallon

 

1.  Review of last time.

 

2.  We’ve been discussing critiques of connectionist architectures.  Here’s one more: symbolist architectures employ physical symbol relations to indicate semantically important relations.  For example, the sentences

 

The man wore the hat with the tiger patch.

 

The tiger wore the hat with the man patch.

 

Contain many of the same concepts (MAN, TIGER, HAT), but the order of the sentence contains semantic information that comprises part of the meaning of the proposition expressed.  As Sterelny notes, connectionism has difficult with such encodings.

 

 

 

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