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Content and Its Vehicles in Connectionist Systems
Author(s) -
SHEA NICHOLAS
Publication year - 2007
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.1468-0017.2007.00308.x
Subject(s) - connectionism , representation (politics) , content (measure theory) , computer science , artificial intelligence , state space , state (computer science) , space (punctuation) , cognitive science , artificial neural network , theoretical computer science , psychology , mathematics , programming language , statistics , politics , political science , law , mathematical analysis , operating system
This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content‐bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained.