Abstract
Traditional connectionist networks are sharply limited as general accounts of human perception and cognition because they are unable to represent relational ideas such as loves (John, Mary) or bigger-than (Volkswagen, breadbox) in a way that allows them to be manipulated as explicitly relational structures. This paper reviews and critiques the four major responses to this problem in the modelling community: (1) reject connectionism (in any form) in favour of traditional symbolic approaches to modelling the mind; (2) reject the idea that mental representations are symbolic (i.e. reject the idea that we can represent relations); and (3) attempt to represent symbolic structures in a connectionist/neural architecture by finding a way to represent role–filler bindings. Approach (3) is further subdivided into (3a) approaches based on varieties of conjunctive coding and (3b) approaches based on dynamic role–filler binding. I will argue that (3b) is necessary to get symbolic processing out of a neural computing architecture. Specifically, I will argue that vector addition is both the best way to accomplish dynamic binding and an essential part of the proper treatment of symbols in a neural architecture.
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