The Architecture of Cognition: Rethinking Fodor and Pylyshyn's Systematicity Challenge

Preface

Is human thought systematic? How can we best explain it? The present volume aims to explore a variety of conceptual and empirical strategies for responding to these two questions. Twenty-five years after Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn originally challenged connectionist theorists to explain the systematicity of cognition, our task in this volume is to reassess and rethink systematicity in the post-connectionist era. In their seminal “Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis” (Cognition 28: 3–71, 1988), Fodor and Pylyshyn argued that the only way for connectionist theory to explain the systematicity of thought is by implementing a classical combinatorial architecture. Connectionist explanations, they claimed, are destined to fail, managing at best to inform us with respect to details of the neural substrate. Explanations at the cognitive level, they argue, simply must be classical insofar as adult human cognition is essentially systematic. It is difficult to overstate the importance of Fodor and Pylyshyn’s argument in cognitive science. In fact, it is not easy task to find an introductory text that does not give a central role to the “systematicity challenge.” However, a quarter of a century later, we inhabit a post-connectionist world, where the disagreement is not between classical and connectionist models, but rather between cognitivism writ large and a range of methodologies such as behavior-based AI, ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, dynamical systems theory, and nonclassical forms of connectionism, among others. Thus, it is worth revisiting the initial challenge to connectionist theory, as originally formulated, in order to understand how the debate looks in this new context. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Fodor and Pylyshyn’s critical analysis provides a suitable occasion to revisit the challenge. To this end, we organized a workshop entitled “Systematicity and the Postconnectionist Era: Taking Stock of the Architecture of Cognition” in the Preface x Preface tiny village of San José in a beautiful corner of Almería, Spain. We are very grateful to the co-organizers, Ángel García, Toni Gomila, and Aarre Laakso, and to the participants for several days of highly productive discussion. Participants in the workshop were asked to focus on systematicity from the perspective of nonclassical approaches in cognitive science. We addressed the following questions: Can we identify novel lines of response from, say, ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, or neurobiologically plausible neural network theory? Would such strategies face the same conceptual challenges as previous connectionist responses? In what way might an implementation-level orientation in embodied cognitive science serve to inform psychological explanation? Is there reason to rethink the claim that thought is systematic? What is the empirical evidence for or against the systematicity of thought? How does the systematicity of human thought relate to human and nonhuman systematic behaviors? What areas of research, other than language, can throw light on the systematicity argument? A number of contributors to this volume (Ken Aizawa, Anthony Chemero, Alicia Coram, Fernando MartínezManrique , Brian McLaughlin, Steven Phillips, Michael Silberstein, and David Travieso) presented preliminary versions of their chapters at the workshop. The topics addressed cut across the cluster of disciplines that constitute contemporary cognitive science. Ensuing discussion and informal interaction continued well beyond the workshop itself, forming the basis for the present volume. To improve the diversity of reactions to the systematicity challenge, we subsequently invited an additional set of essays from a number of researchers who had not been at the workshop (Gideon Borensztajn, Willem Zuidema, and William Bechtel; Jeff Elman; Stefan Frank; Edouard Machery, Gary Marcus; Randall O’Reilly, Alex Petrov, Jonathan Cohen, Christian Lebiere, Seth Herd, and Seth Kriete; Bill Ramsey). The present volume is the finished product of this joint effort. We are confident that it provides a representative sample and an overview of some of the most important developments in the scientific literature on the systematicity of cognition. We are thankful to many people for their work on this three-year project. First of all, we are very grateful to the contributors. They have worked in a highly collaborative spirit, reviewing each other’s work and responding to one another in a way that has helped to unify and consolidate the volume. The sharp focus of this volume has meant that in many of the papers there is some degree of overlap with respect to introductory discussions of systematicity. As editors, we encouraged contributors to set the stage as they wished. In our view, their divergent emphases with respect [3.145.151.141] Project MUSE (2024...