Content and its vehicles in connectionist systems

TY - JOUR

T1 - Content and its vehicles in connectionist systems

AU - Shea, N

PY - 2007/6

Y1 - 2007/6

N2 - This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content-bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained.

AB - This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content-bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained.

U2 - 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00308.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00308.x

M3 - Article

SN - 0268-1064

VL - 22

SP - 246

EP - 269

JO - Mind & Language

JF - Mind & Language

IS - 3

ER -