Re: a request / Connectionism
Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Mon, 23 Mar 1998 09:56:22 -0800 (PST)
As I understand the form of connectionism proposed by Elman, Bates, et al
in *Rethinking innateness: they are proposing a form of emergentism. It
is best captured for me in Bates' metaphor of the relateion of behives
to the genetic makeup of bees. Bees have founds, but they produce hexagonal
hives structures. They do this as they pack honeycombe material into as small
a space as possible with their round heads. The result of packing lots of
circular units into small spaces is a hexagnal hive. But there is no
"hexagon making" module in the brain, nor is their a UG grammar module,
etc. Rather, UG is the emergent solution of packing lots of stuff (
meanings) into a tiny channel (the speech stream).
Have I got this right?
mike