Page 124 - Contribution To Phenomenology

CONNECTIONISMAND PHENOMENOLOGY 117

according to programmable rules in order to process data and store
information, and then on the basis of these rules and stored information
to process other data and perform specific tasks for which the machines
have been programmed in the first place.^ It follows from this model of
the mind as a computer, the "classical" model of a computer, that
cognition is nothing other than "rule-governed symbol manipulation."'
This characterization points to two things: a) the formal character of
the operations, the fact that these programs function analogously to
mathematical calculus or propositional logic, i.e., apply to a wide range
of possible subject matter precisely because the performance of the
operation is indifferent to the particular data to be processed; and b) the
susceptibility of these manipulated entities, be they thought of as data,
information strings, or the physical states of the machine, to being
interpreted in terms of something else that they represent, i.e., as
representations of beliefs and desires or things in the real world—a point
which is especially relevant when applying the computer model to the
mental life of humans and asking what it means for beliefs and desires
to "represent" the world. I will say a little more about this in the fourth
part of my paper.
When applied to the mental life of human beings, the assumption is
that we should think of beliefs and desires as resembling symbols whose
formal relations and patterns of derivation would be determined according
to the rules of some mental "program."^ But perhaps even more
important is the notion of a rule as a rigid and programmable operation
that is to be performed upon the symbol in an explicitly specified way
under precisely specified conditions. Convenient models of such rules are
found in algebra and other forms of discrete mathematics, and in formal
logic.^ Thus for a tradition that had long conceived of thinking as a kind

^ An intriguing critique of current cognitive psychology and the computer model of
the mind from a Continental perspective has recently been advanced by Fred Evans,
Psychology and Nihilism: A Geneohgical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Chapter 5 includes an explicit
treatment of connectionism, which is followed in the next chapter by a critique of
cognitive psychology that draws on Merleau-Ponty's notion of the "body-subject."

^Tienson 1991,1.
^ See here especially Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 8-14.

^ Tienson 1991: "Connectionist mathematics is the mathematics of dynamical
systems; its equations look like equations in a physics text book. The mathematics of the
classical picture is discrete mathematics. Its formulae look comfortingly (to the