What Is the Received View?
Today, an email exchange with Michael Rescorla made me wonder about the received view among philosophers of cognitive science.
In the 1980s, the received view used to be something like the language of thought hypothesis, or at least some symbols-and-rules framework of which the language of thought hypothesis was the most prominent representative.
Since the 1990s, it seems to me that most philosophers of cognitive science are more ready to assume some variant of connectionism. So now connectionism is the received view.
Does this seem right?
Caveat 1: Much could be said about what "connectionism" means, or doesn't mean, or should mean, but I'll leave that aside for today.
Caveat 2: Undoubtedly, even today many philosophers remain sympathetic to symbols-and-rules, while many others reject computations, or representations, or both, altogether.
I'd disagree that the received view is connectionism, but to explain this I'm going to have to ignore caveat number 1 a bit. When I think of connectionism I think of late '80's "wow, look at what you can do with a massively connected feedforward network"-style connectionism whereby there were supposed to be either no representations or only massively distributed hidden-layer representations. Nowadays when I look at the work of people who care about neural networks (either real or artificial) in philosophy--people like me, Rick Grush, Chris Eliasmith, Michael Anderson, to name just a few--the models appealed to don't have the same massively distributed holistic character.
And that's just the friends of neurons I'm talking about. There are still plenty of people in phil of cog sci that don't see what the big hoopla about neural networks is supposed to be about. Connectionism aside, I don't even see that there's a received view with a particularly brainy flavor, but maybe I've been on the east coast too long.
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Huge complicated topic. Bear with me as I start out with realistic neural models.
In neuroscience, the recieved view was supplied by Hodgkin and Huxely (HH) in 1952. They have provided the quantitative framework in which neuroscientists think about how brains work, and when we talk about "biologically realistic" models this is what we are referring to. If you ask a group of computational neuroscientists what the greatest success story of their field is, probably 9.6/10 will say the HH model of the neuron (I could go on about this, but I assume everyone is familiar with these models). The working assumption of systems neuroscience is that we will ultimately explain behavior in terms of such models (and of course we can include the world, muscles, body or whatever for all the externalists out there, but they will be glued together by neurons).
Moving up in the heirarchy of abstraction, we have the old-school connectionist type models, which have been of almost no use in neuroscience, but are useful speculative psychological models (as they stressed in the 1986 volumes).
These two levels can be connected in principled ways. For instance, Bard Ermentrout proved that a network of HH neurons reduces to connectionist nets when certain assumptions are made about the HH networks (1994: Reduction of conductance-based models with slow synapses to neural nets).
At a level even higher, we have the rules and representations (RR) folks, who are also creating speculative psychological models. I think Sompolinsky has made the most serious attempt to connect this RR-level with the connectionist level. His recent two-volume book The Harmonic Mind goes over this in great detail. What impresses me about that treatise is that he really takes seriously the theories of modern (Chomskian) linguistics and connectionism, and tries to show how RRs can emerge from his models. (He, however, is clear to say that linguistics isn't smoothly reducing to the ANN theory).
Getting back to the question, it is pretty clear there are (at least) two paradigms. Connectionism survived its rebirth, and there is a still-growing set of modellers working within its framework. The RR view certainly hasn't died, but Fodor's old argument from LOT explicitly relied on the premise "There is no alternative to the RR view", but this is no longer true. We have at least one other view.
My impression is that people just got sick of hearing abstract and inconclusive arguments from the two sides (the Fodor/Churchland show) and don't quite know what to make of it. I think this is a good thing: we don't know what to make of it because we don't have enough data to know which side (or sides) to believe. In time, we'll see how much of each of the three above levels of abstraction will be required to explain human behavior. The insights won't come from philosophy as much as dirty, difficult, and decades-long empirical work.
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I said Sompolinsky above, but meant Smolensky, when discussing the book The Harmonic Mind.
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