Mother Nature versus the Walking Encyclopedia

Abstract

In 1982, Feldman and Ballard published "Connectionist models and their properties" in Cognitive Science, helping to focus attention on a family of similarly inspired research strategies just then under way, by giving the family a name: "connectionism." Now, seven years later, the connectionist nation has swelled to include such subfamilies as "PDP" and "neural net models." Since the ideological foes of connectionism are keen to wipe it out in one fell swoop aimed at its "essence", it is worth noting the diversity of not only the models but also the aspirations of the modelers. There is no good reason to suppose that they all pledge allegiance to any one principle or set of principles that could be shown to be false or incoherent. Those who think they are making exciting progress on their chosen projects have no particular reason to declare their own brand orthodox, and other brands ("rival" brands) heretical. Let a thousand flowers bloom and soon enough the sickly plants will succumb, without need of ideological condemnation.