Two Questions About the Origins of Connectionism

The connectionism that most people know about become popular in the 1980s.  It is defined, more or less, as the attempt to explain or model cognitive functions using artificial neural networks.  The name “connectionism” for this movement goes back at least to a 1982 article by Feldman and Ballard (“Connectionist Models …

‘Pancomputationalism’: Origins of a Neologism

I just discovered that the view that everything in the universe is a computing system is “now often called” ‘pancomputationalism’, as Vincent Mueller puts it.  Mueller is right.  As of today, Googling ‘pancomputationalism’ generates 195 results, beginning with the omnipresent wikipedia article (titled “digital physics”).  I had no idea; for all I knew, I …

European Journal Rankings (ERIH)

The European Science Foundation has been working on ranking academic journals in various disciplines.  Here are their brand new rankings of journals in philosophy and in history and philosophy of science.I recently spoke with a member of the committee that ranked philosophy journals.  He explained the ESF criteria as follows:Journals that …

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