title: Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks
author: William Bechtel
description: Neural network theory is shaking up fields as disparate as philosophy and ecology: the paradigm shift is here. The second edition of <I>Connectionism and the Mind: Parallel Processing, Dynamics, and Evolution in Networks</I> has been rewritten and restructured to accommodate the profound changes wrought during the '90s burst of research in the field. Authors William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen present their material clearly and accessibly, asking of their readers only a familiarity with algebra and formal logic. Covering the basics of representation, architecture, and rules, they move on to deep and exciting questions about connectionism's implications for artificial intelligence and neuroscience--thought-provoking reading for nearly everyone. The text is stimulating and offers hundreds of routes to further study through its well-integrated bibliography. <I>Connectionism and the Mind</I> is essentially a progress report on a very young discipline; its readers will see the future a little more clearly. <I>--Rob Lightner</I>
zlib_text: Introduction
  During the past two years there has been more discussion of the foundations
  of cognitive science than in the 25 years preceding . The impetus for this
  reexamination has been a new approach to studying the mind , called "Con-
  nectionism
  " , " Parallel 
  Distributed 
  Processin2
  " , or " Neural 
  Networks
  " . The
  -
  assumptions behind this approach differ in substantial ways from the " central
  dogma" of cognitive science, that intelligence is the result of the manipulation
  of structured symbolic expressions. Instead , connectionists suggest that intel -
  ligence is to be understood as the result of the transmission of activation
  levels in large networks of densely interconnected simple units .
  Connectionism has spawned an enormous amount of research activity in a
  short time . Much 
  of the excitement 
  surrounding 
  the movement 
  has been
  inspired by the rich possibilities inherent in ideas such as massive parallel
  processing, distributed representation , constraint satisfaction , n