Connectionism vs AI

[Elizabeth Preston]

   Date: Sat, 15 Dec 90 13:59:52 -0500
   From: "Andrew J. Worth" <worth%park.bu.EDU at uga.cc.uga.edu>

   Jerry Feldman's posting ("Scientific American") foments a long
   standing dispute within my mind; are there fundamental differences
   between connectionism and AI that make them incompatible in an ideal
   sense?

I'm afraid this dispute is not all in your mind; a great deal of ink
and hot air has been expended on it in various public forums over the
last few years.  Perhaps the most familiar version of this dispute is
the proposal by some that connectionism represents a paradigm shift
(in the Kuhnian sense) in our understanding of cognition.  This would
make connectionism and AI not merely incompatible, but
incommensurable; e.g., it would follow that connectionism and AI are
in some sense not even working on the same problem(s), and that
connectionists and AI-ists are in some sense not even understanding
each other when they talk.  Pretty radical stuff.  Of course there are
those who respond to this talk of a paradigm shift with incredulous
stares and phrases on the order of "oh, pooh" and "nonsense".  People
on this end of the spectrum have been known to argue that
connectionism is merely a way of implementing AI; in which case, far
from being incompatible, they are basically the same thing.

Although I think there are a lot of interesting and helpful things to
be said about the similarities and differences between AI and
connectionism, I doubt very much whether the question of FUNDAMENTAL
compatibility/incompatibility is going to be settled on the conceptual
level anytime soon.  I say this partly because I don't think it has
ever really been settled for the relationship between empiricism and
rationalism in philosophy, or for the relationship between behaviorism
and cognitivism in psychology, and these divisions in philosophy and
psychology are pretty clearly the historical antecedents of the
division in computational circles between connectionism and AI.  And
partly I say this because I don't see that the question is answerable
at this stage in the development and theoretical understanding of the
two fields.  In fact, I'm not sure it's even askable.

   If each approach has fundamentally different and opposing assumptions,
   then wouldn't one or both of them have to be weakened in their
   combination?

As a philosopher with a great deal of experience in armchair
theorizing, I must say I wouldn't touch this one with a stick.
Why don't you try it out and see what happens?


Beth Preston