Introduction

In the last 50 years, there have been three major approaches to understanding cognitive systems and theorizing about the nature of the mind: symbolicism, connectionism, and dynamicism. Each of these approaches has relied heavily on a preferred metaphor for understanding the mind/brain. Most famously, symbolicism, or classical cognitive science, relies on the “mind as computer” metaphor. Under this view, the mind is the software of the brain. Jerry Fodor, for one, has argued that the impressive theoretical power provided by this metaphor is good reason to suppose that cognitive systems have a symbolic “language of thought,” which, like a computer programming language, expresses the rules that the system follows. Fodor claims that this metaphor is essential for providing a useful account of how the mind works.

Similarly, connectionists have relied on a metaphor for providing their account of how the mind works. This metaphor, however, is much more subtle than the symbolicist one; connectionists presume that the functioning of the mind is like the functioning of the brain. The subtlety of the “mind as brain” metaphor lies in the fact that connectionists, like symbolicists, are materialists. That is, they also hold that the mind is the brain. However, when providing psychological descriptions, it is the metaphor that matters, not the identity. In deference to the metaphor, the founders of this approach call it “brain-style” processing and claim to be discussing “abstract networks.”