Abstract
Recent work in connectionist modeling has had a major impact on contemporary philosophy of psychology — it has forced many philosophers to seriously rethink a number of important topics such as the structure of mental representation, the nature of information storage and the character of learning. In this essay, however, I want to link connectionism to philosophy in a different way. Rather than discuss the importance of connectionism for some philosophical topic, I want to focus on the implications of this research for the way philosophy often gets done. More specifically, I want to take a look at what many connectionists have to say about the way we represent concepts and discuss some consequences of their views for the popular philosophical enterprise of conceptual analysis — i.e., the search for precise definitions specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for abstract notions. My aim will be to convince you that if much of what the connectionists are saying is true, then analytic philosophers need to seriously rethink this popular strategy for understanding the defining many abstract concepts.
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Ramsey, W. (1996). Conceptual Analysis and the Connectionist Account of Concepts. In: Clark, A., Ezquerro, J., Larrazabal, J.M. (eds) Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Categories, Consciousness, and Reasoning. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8731-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8731-0_2
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