Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

192 JORDAN ZLATEV
2. Thus the picture at the bottom of Figure 1, which the system receives as input, should be
described as, e.g., “The circle is above the rectangle.” not as “The rectangle is below the
circle.”
3. In Harnad’s “dualism” the connectionist/symbolic dichotomy roughly corresponds to
perception/conception, while in the perhaps better known “hybrid” proposals of Pinker
(e.g., Pinker and Prince 1988) the symbolic part is to model the “rules of language”, while
the connectionist - the analogies. Harnad can be said to want to cut the cake horizontally,
Pinker vertically.
4. The difference in the training sets involving “go” and “fly” (somewhat arbitrarily decided
on) was that the first but not the second involved contact between the objects.
5. Note that it is not the technical aspect of “feed-forwardness” (nor the backpropagation
learning rule) that is to blame, but the input/output interpretation of situations and
expressions. Instead situations and expressions should be treated in parallel, e.g., as they
are in the “autoassociative” feed-forward system of Plunkett et al. (1992).
References
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Chomsky, N.
1959 “A review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour”. Language 35. 26-58.
Chomsky, N.
1971 Selected Readings, ed. by J.P.B. Allen & P. van Buren, Oxford: Oxford
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Dorffner, G.
1989 A sub-symbolic connectionist model of basic language functions. Dissertation,
Indiana University, Computer Science Department.
Dorffner, G. & Prem, E.
1993 “Connectionism, symbol grounding, and autonomous agents”. 15th Annual
Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Symposium on “Grounding,
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Dreyfus, H.
1991 Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,
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Edelman, G.
1992 Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic
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