Abstract

Contemporary cognitive science has two principal branches: the classical computational approach (sometimes called classicism) and connectionism. Rules are fundamental to theorizing about the basic units of processing in both classicism and connectionism. But we will be concerned primarily with rules that apply to representations and that determine transitions from one cognitive/representational state to the next. Such rules are fundamental to classicism, since, according to classicism, cognitive processes simply are rule‐governed cognitive state transitions. Rules that apply to representations are not a built‐in feature of connectionist architecture, so the role of such rules in connectionism is less clear. We will argue that they are neither necessary nor (in general) desirable in connectionism. We discuss the status of rules first in classicism, then in connectionism.