Post

Proudly published with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social: A metatheory of classical and modern connectionism. doi.org/10.1037/rev0... We touch on what has been up with connectionism as a framework for computational modelling — & for everything it seems these days with AI and LLMs — pre-2010 vs post. 1/n

One important thing we need to impress on colleagues and everybody, I guess, is that these systems and the ideas behind them are NOT new. As you see from Margaret Boden's words, they might even be 100s of years old! doi.org/10.1037/rev0... 2/n

Another, related aspect, that I wanted to highlight in this work is the difference in stances — some much more damaging than others — that appears to have occurred around 2010. These are summarised in Table 1, here: doi.org/10.1037/rev0...; e.g. goals seem to shift from theory to prediction. 3/n

Also I want to emphasise that splitting the two types is not some easy task, nor do we suggest after 2010 classical connectionism is fully dead/replaced by modern connectionism entirely, nor are we saying that other splits are not useful or important! doi.org/10.1037/rev0... 5/n

Importantly, to avoid terminological confusions — not everybody in psychology uses or is expert on what ANNs are — but also often proponents cultivate purposeful mystification and obfuscation: Artificial neural networks are mathematical objects implemented on computers doi.org/10.1037/rev0... 6/n

I cannot boil down all the paper into posts without just copy-pasting too much of it (doi.org/10.1037/rev0... & OA osf.io/eaf2z/downlo...). But the main gists are captured in this cartoon and the formalisms in section "Argumentation"; C connectionism doesn't have correlationism as a cornerstone. 7/n