ABSTRACT
Connectionist approaches to the modeling of cognitive processes have often been attacked on the grounds that they do not employ compositionally structured representations (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn 1988). But what exactly is compositional structure, and how does such structure contribute to cognitive processing? This paper clarifies these questions by distinguishing two different styles of compositionality, one characteristic of connectionist modeling and the other essential to mainstream symbolic or “Classical” approaches. Given this distinction, it is clear that connectionist models can employ compositionally structured representations while remaining, both conceptually and in practice, quite distinct from the Classical approach; moreover, it can be shown that certain central aspects of cognition, such as its systematicity, are at least in principle amenable to Connectionist explanation.
