The architecture of cognition : rethinking Fodor and Pylyshyn's systematicity challenge

483 Pages·2014·4.327 MB·English

by  Calvo, Paco, Fodor, Jerry A., Pylyshyn, Zenon W., Symons, John

The Architecture of Cognition

The Architecture of Cognition
Rethinking Fodor and Pylyshyn’ s Systematicity Challenge
edited by Paco Calvo and John Symons
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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ISBN: 978-0-262-02723-6

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Contents
Preface ix
I
1 Systematicity: An Overview 3
John Symons and Paco Calvo
2 Can an ICS Architecture Meet the Systematicity and Productivity
Challenges? 31
Brian P. McLaughlin
3 Tough Times to Be Talking Systematicity 77
Ken Aizawa
II
4 PDP and Symbol Manipulation: What ’ s Been Learned Since
1986? 103
Gary Marcus
5 Systematicity in the Lexicon: On Having Your Cake and Eating It
Too 115
Jeffrey L. Elman
6 Getting Real about Systematicity 147
Stefan L. Frank
7 Systematicity and the Need for Encapsulated Representations 165
Gideon Borensztajn, Willem Zuidema, and William Bechtel
8 How Limited Systematicity Emerges: A Computational Cognitive
Neuroscience Approach 191
Randall C. O ’ Reilly, Alex A. Petrov, Jonathan D. Cohen, Christian J. Lebiere,
Seth A. Herd, and Trent Kriete
viii Contents
9 A Category Theory Explanation for Systematicity: Universal
Constructions 227
Steven Phillips and William H. Wilson
III
10 Systematicity and Architectural Pluralism 253
William Ramsey
11 Systematicity Laws and Explanatory Structures in the Extended
Mind 277
Alicia Coram
12 Systematicity and Conceptual Pluralism 305
Fernando Mart í nez-Manrique
13 Neo-Empiricism and the Structure of Thoughts 335
Edouard Machery
IV
14 Systematicity and Interaction Dominance 353
Anthony Chemero
15 From Systematicity to Interactive Regularities: Grounding Cognition
at the Sensorimotor Level 371
David Travieso, Antoni Gomila, and Lorena Lobo
16 The Emergence of Systematicity in Minimally Cognitive
Agents 397
Paco Calvo, Emma Mart í n, and John Symons
17 Order and Disorders in the Form of Thought: The Dynamics of
Systematicity 435
Michael Silberstein
Contributors 453
Index 457
Preface
Is human thought systematic? How can we best explain it? The present
volume aims to explore a variety of conceptual and empirical strategies for
responding to these two questions. Twenty-five years after Jerry Fodor and
Zenon Pylyshyn originally challenged connectionist theorists to explain
the systematicity of cognition, our task in this volume is to reassess and
rethink systematicity in the post-connectionist era.
In their seminal “ Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical
Analysis ” ( Cognition 28: 3– 71, 1988), Fodor and Pylyshyn argued that the
only way for connectionist theory to explain the systematicity of thought
is by implementing a classical combinatorial architecture. Connectionist
explanations, they claimed, are destined to fail, managing at best to inform
us with respect to details of the neural substrate. Explanations at the cogni-
tive level, they argue, simply must be classical insofar as adult human
cognition is essentially systematic. It is difficult to overstate the importance
of Fodor and Pylyshyn ’ s argument in cognitive science. In fact, it is not
easy task to find an introductory text that does not give a central role to
the “ systematicity challenge.”
However, a quarter of a century later, we inhabit a post-connectionist
world, where the disagreement is not between classical and connectionist
models, but rather between cognitivism writ large and a range of method-
ologies such as behavior-based AI, ecological psychology, embodied and
distributed cognition, dynamical systems theory, and nonclassical forms
of connectionism, among others. Thus, it is worth revisiting the initial
challenge to connectionist theory, as originally formulated, in order to
understand how the debate looks in this new context.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Fodor and Pylyshyn’ s
critical analysis provides a suitable occasion to revisit the challenge. To
this end, we organized a workshop entitled “ Systematicity and the Post-
connectionist Era: Taking Stock of the Architecture of Cognition ” in the