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[Richard Hall]

Reply-To: Andy Clark <andycl at uk.ac.sussex.unx1>

    The Guest Editors would welcome any contributions to the forthcoming
Special Issue. Please send all replies to the EMAIL addresses listed below
and not the sender's!

                                                    -- Richard Hall.


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>   CONNECTIONISM  IN  CONTEXT   <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

__________________________ A Special Issue ________________________________

                            AI & Society

              Journal Of Human And Machine Intelligence

          A New International Journal from Springer-Verlag

___________________________________________________________________________


AI & Society would like to invite you to a discussion of the horizons of
CONNECTIONIST MODELLING. The SPECIAL ISSUE aims to treat connectionism in a
wide context including its social and cultural implications. It would also
discuss developments in NEUROCOMPUTING and issues such as validation and
legal constraints. Some of the topics of interest include:


1. Can connectionist models of individual information-processing be
fruitfully extended to help model and undestand social wholes (eg countries,
committees, ant-colonies!)?

2. Can connectionism illuminate developmental issues in a new way? Can it
perhape illuminate the evolutionary trajectory of mind?

3. Is symbolic AI necessary to an understanding of the full range of human
thought?

4. Connectionism, semiotics, and literary criticism. Can connectionistic
accounts of learning and knowledge representation shed any new light on
discussions of meaning (or vice versa)?

5. How powerful is the idea of cultural knowledge (raised by Smolensky) as
involving the use of a special virtual machine (the conscious rule
interpreter) which uses a subsymbolic implementation of a symbol processing
society.

6. "Real Symbol Processing", it is claimed, depends upon the devoius
combination of PDP based capacities with actual manipulation of structures in
the external world. Is it our ability to create and use physical
representation which is the key to our capacity to engage in serial symbolic
thought? Could conventional computer architectures be putting back into deep
structures of the head what really belongs in the interaction of the head and
the world?

7. PDP and ecological psychology. Could PDP provide an account of the
mechanisms which ecological psychology (despite its occaisonal claims) seems
to need but could never previously display?


Editorial Team for the Special Issue on Connectionism:

Guest Editors:          Andy Clark and Rudy Lutz,
                        School of Cognitive Sciences,
                        University of Sussex,
                        Brighton,
                        Sussex,  UK

AI & Society Editors:   Janet Vaux and Ajit Narayanan.


Contributions could include brief discussion papers for the Open Forum section
or major papers for the main section of AI & Society.

PAPERS SHOULD BE SUBMITTED either to our

GUEST EDITORS, Andy Clark and Rudi Lutz

or to the AI & Society EDITOR:  Karamjit S Gill,
                                Seake Centre,
                                Brighton Polytechnic,
                                Moulsecomb,
                                Brighton,
                                BN2 4GJ,
                                Sussex  UK


EMAIL:  JANET:      andycl at uk.ac.sussex.unx1
        BITNET:     andycl at unx1.sussex.ac.uk
        ARPANET:    andycl%uk.ac.sussex.unx1 at nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk