Stöckle-Schobel Richard
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, UK.
Front Psychol. 2012 Mar 30;3:93. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00093. eCollection 2012.
A central challenge for any theory of concept learning comes from Fodor's argument against the learning of concepts, which lies at the basis of contemporary computationalist accounts of the mind. Robert Goldstone and his colleagues propose a theory of perceptual learning that attempts to overcome Fodor's challenge. Its main component is the addition of a cognitive device at the interface of perception and conception, which slowly builds "cognitive symbols" out of perceptual stimuli. Two main mechanisms of concept creation are unitization and differentiation. In this paper, I will present and examine their theory, and will show that two problems hinder this reply to Fodor's challenge from being a successful answer to the challenge. To amend the theory, I will argue that one would need to say more about the input systems to unitization and differentiation, and be clearer on the representational format that they are able to operate upon. Until these issues have been addressed, the proposal does not deploy its full potential to threaten a Fodorian position.
任何概念学习理论面临的一个核心挑战源于福多反对概念学习的论点，该论点是当代心智计算主义解释的基础。罗伯特·戈德斯通及其同事提出了一种知觉学习理论，试图克服福多的挑战。其主要组成部分是在感知与概念的接口处添加一种认知装置，该装置从感知刺激中缓慢构建出“认知符号”。概念创建的两个主要机制是单元化和分化。在本文中，我将阐述并审视他们的理论，并表明有两个问题阻碍了对福多挑战的这一回应成为对该挑战的成功解答。为修正该理论，我将论证需要更多地说明单元化和分化的输入系统，并更明确它们能够操作的表征格式。在这些问题得到解决之前，该提议并未充分发挥其威胁福多立场的潜力。
