Chapter 2. Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the Future of Folk Psychology

Authors: Stich, Stephen P.; Ramsey, William; Garon, Joseph

Source: Deconstructing the Mind, January 1999 , pp. 91-115(25)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

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Abstract:

This chapter provides an example of the sort of argument that eliminativists have proposed. The central claim is that if a certain sort of connectionist model of belief or memory turns out to be correct, then folk psychology is seriously mistaken, and that would support eliminativism about propositional attitudes. Folk psychology depicts beliefs and other propositional attitudes as functionally discrete, semantically interpretable states that play a causal role in the production of other propositional attitudes, and ultimately in the production of behavior. But the family of connectionist models, described and illustrated, represents or encodes information in a widely distributed or holistic fashion, and the “hidden” units in the models have no comfortable semantic interpretation.

Keywords: folk psychology; semantic interpretation; propositional attitude; eliminativism; connectionism; representation; holism

Document Type: Research article

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