Zenon Pylyshyn

[A computer program for Task A qua an explanatory model and how a human cognizer actually carries out Task A are equivalent in the strong sense when it can be shown that]... the model and the organism are carrying out the same process.

What people report is not properties of their image but of the objects they are imagining. Such properties as color, shape, size and so on are clearly properties of the objects that are being imagined. This distinction is crucial. The seemingly innocent scope slip that takes image of object X with property Pro mean (image of object X) with property P instead of the correct image of (object X with property P) is probably the most ubiquitous and damaging conclusion in the whole imagery literature.

[If] we equip the programmed computer with transducers so it can interact freely with a natural environment and a linguistic one, as well as the power to make inferences, it is far from obvious what if any latitude the theorist (who knows how the transducers operate and therefore what they respond to) would still have in assigning a coherent interpretation to the functional states so as to capture psychologically relevant regularities in behavior. If the answer is that the theorist is left with no latitude beyond the usual inductive indeterminism all theories have in the face of finite data, it would be perverse to deny that these states had the semantic content assigned to them by the theory.

When taken as a way of modeling cognitive architecture, really does represent an approach that is quite different from that of the classical cognitive science that it seeks to replace. Classical models of the mind were derived from the structure of Turing and Von Neumann machines. They are not, of course, committed to the details of these machines as exemplified in Turing's original formulation or in typical commercial computers—only to the basic idea that the kind of computing that is relevant to understanding cognition involves operations on symbols.. In contrast, connectionists propose to design systems that can exhibit intelligent behavior without storing, retrieving, or otherwise operating on structured symbolic expressions. The style of processing carried out in such models is thus strikingly unlike what goes on when conventional machines are computing some function.

The term knowledge raises philosophical eyebrows (strictly speaking, it should be called belief).

Rather than a series of levels, we have a distinguished level, , the level at which interpretation of the symbols is in the intentional, or cognitive, domain or in the domain of the objects of thought.

No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the image must accelerate and decelerate or that the relation among torque, angular momentum, and angular velocity has a,1 analogue in the mental rotation case. Of course it may tum our that it takes subjects longer to rotate an object that they imagine to be heavier, thus increasing the predictive value of the metaphor. But in that case it seems clearer that, even if it was predictive, the metaphor could nor be explanatory (surely, no one believes that some images are heavier than others and the heavier ones accelerate more slowly).