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Content, Context, and Compositionality
Author(s) -
BUTLER KEITH
Publication year - 1995
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/j.1468-0017.1995.tb00003.x
Subject(s) - principle of compositionality , connectionism , context (archaeology) , encoding (memory) , cognitive science , computer science , mental representation , cognitive psychology , psychology , cognition , artificial intelligence , artificial neural network , history , neuroscience , archaeology
This paper addresses the question of whether mental representations are compositional. Several researchers have claimed recently that there are empirical data that show mental representations to be context‐sensitive in a way that threatens compositionality. Some have then gone on to claim that connectionist encoding schemes are well suited to accommodate such noncom‐positionality. I argue here that the data do not show that mental representations are noncompositional, and that there are significant problems with the suggested interpretations of connectionist encoding schemes.