Taking connectionism seriously: The Vague Promise of Subsymbolism and an Alternative.

Connectionism is drawing much attention as a new paradigm for cognitive science. An important objective of connectionism has become the definition of a subsymbolic bridge between the mind and the brain. By analyzing an important example of this subsymbolic approach, NETtalk, I will show that this type of connectionism does not fulfil its promises and is applying new techniques in a symbolic approach. It is shown that connectionist models can only become part of such a new approach when they are embedded in an alternative conceptual framework where the emphasis is not placed upon what knowledge a system must posses to be able to accomplish a task but on how a system can develop this knowledge through its interaction with the environment. Introduction Connectionism has been gaining much attention in cognitive science. On of the reasons is that problems of the traditional cognitivistic approach, like the need for noise and fault tolerance and the capability to generalize, are solvable wit..