Representation in Pictorialism and Connectionism

Abstract

Pictorialism is the thesis that mental images represent in the manner of pictures. Connectionism, or “parallel distributed processing,” as it is sometimes called, is a much more general thesis about the mind. Central to this thesis are the following claims: the mind is a huge structure of simple units linked together in a uniform, largely parallel network; units interact by exciting or inhibiting activity in one another; information processing takes place through the interactions between units; mental representations are typically patterns of activation involving many units.¹ On the face of it, then, pictorialism and connectionism have little in common. Under the surface, however, there are certain similarities. Both views introduce concepts of representation which are not easy to grasp. Both views, although couched in information processing terms, have a definite physiological flavor. Admittedly, in the case of pictorialism, this flavor is not immediately discernible. But, it comes to the fore, as we shall see later, once the pictorialist thesis is fully stated. And both views seem opposed to the dominant idea in cognitive psychology over the past twenty-five years that the exercise of our cognitive capacities always involves the computational manipulation of linguistic or quasi-linguistic representations.