Perception, connectionism, and cognitive science

Christine Skarda

pp. 265-271

in: Francisco Varela, Jean-Pierre Dupuy (eds), Understanding origins, Berlin, Springer, 1992

Abstract

Recent findings in neurophysiology and cognitive science point to the same conclusion: cognition can be explained without appeal to the representations and rules of earlier cognitivist explanations. Yet if this is true, we want to know what form the alternative explanation will take and what processes are responsible for cognitive phenomena like perception. In this paper l discuss three issues: (1) the correct characterization of the alternative to cognitivism; (2) the resulting view of perception based on the alternative; and (3) the implications of this alternative explanatory framework for cognitive science.