SEMANTICS IS NOT THE ISSUE
Reply to French & Cleeremans on Connectionist-Explanation

Abstract

French & Cleeremans claim that my argument (Green 1998) requires that every part of a connectionist network be semantically interpretable. They have confused semantic interpretation (an issue peculiar to cognitive science) with a simple correspondence between aspects of models and aspects of the portion of the world being modeled (an issue as relevant to physics as to cognitive science), and have thereby misunderstood my position. Most of the rest of their commentary follows from their initial misapprehension.

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References

• Churchland, P. M. (1990) Cognitive activity in artificial neural networks. In: Thinking: An invitation to cognitive science (Vol. 3), ed. D. N. Osherson & E. E. Smith, MIT Press.
• Crick, F.H.C. & Asanuma, C. (1986) Certain aspects of the anatomy and physiology of the cerebral cortex. In: Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (vol. 2), ed. McClelland, J. L. & Rumelhart, D. E., MIT Press.
• Fodor, J. A. & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition 28:3-71.
• French, R. M. & Cleermans, A. (1998) Function, sufficiently constrained, implies form: Commentary on Green on connectionist- explanation. PSYCOLOQUY 9 (21) ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/ psyc.98.9.21.connectionist-explanation.18.french
• Green, C.D. (1998) Are Connectionist Models Theories of Cognition? PSYCOLOQUY 9 (4) ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1998.volume.9/ psyc.98.9.04.connectionist-explanation.1.green