Abstract

Classical computationalism sees cognition as manipulation of syntactically structured representations while connectionism sees it as transformation of syntactically unstructured representations, namely, activation patterns of neurons. J. Fodor and Z. Pylyshyn argue that connectionism fails because every cognitive ability is systematic so that representations in any cognitive domain are syntactically structured. But I argue that some cognitive abilities are not systematic. Classical computationalism holds only for some cognitive domains. But I do not think that our brain is a hybrid of a classical model and a connectionist one. It is wholly connectionist. Syntactically structured representations exist not in our brain but in our environment as external representations. Consequently, eliminativism is right in that propositional attitudes such as belief and desire do not exist in our brain.