ABSTRACT
After a long and exhausting war between the representatives of the symbolic and connectionist approaches (this war stimulated, however, the clarification of the limitations and advantages of both approaches) a growing group of peace-makers emerged who tried to integrate the advantages of both approaches and to fill in the gap between them (Hendler, 1989a, Hinton, 1990, Barnden & Pollack, 1991, Thornton, 1991, Sun & Bookman, 1992, Sun & Bookman, 1994, Dinsmore, 1992, Holyoak & Barnden, 1994. However, a mini-war started between the peace-makers themselves on the issue of how to sign the peace treaty: with the surrender of one of the approaches or with their parity. Some researchers supported the connectionist-to-the-top view that symbol structures and symbol processing should emerge from the work of a neural network (called a unified approach in chapters 2 and 4 of this volume and connectionist symbol processing in Elman, 1990, Pollack, 1990, Smolensky, 1990, Touretzky, 1990, Smolensky, Legendre, Miyata, 1992, Smolensky, 1995, while others supported the synergistic hybrid approach bringing together connectionist and symbolic machines in a single system or model Hendler, 1989b, Hendler, 1991, Lange & Dyer, 1989, Sun, 1991. Strangely enough, no one suggested building connectionist systems on the top of a symbolic system.
