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A Connectionist Defence of the Inscrutability Thesis
Author(s) -
Calvo Garzón Francisco
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0017.00145
Subject(s) - wright , connectionism , section (typography) , epistemology , cognitive science , quine , philosophy , simplicity , computer science , psychology , artificial intelligence , artificial neural network , programming language , operating system
This paper consists of four parts. In section 1, I shall offer a strategy to bypass a counter‐example which Gareth Evans (1975) offers against Quine’s Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference. In section 2, I shall introduce a criterion recently pro‐duced by Crispin Wright (1997) in terms of ‘psychological simplicity’ which threatens the perverse route offered in section 1. In section 3, I shall argue that a LOT model of human cognition could motivate Wright’s criterion. In section 4, I shall argue that if we instead model human cognition by a recurrent neural network, then Wright’s criterion is unmotivated. Thus I shall produce a Connectionist Defence of the Inscrutability Thesis.