Connectionism , Artificial Life , and Dynamical Systems : New approaches to old questions

Periodically in science there arrive on the scene what appear to be dramatically new theoretical frameworks (what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has called “paradigm shifts”). Characteristic of such changes in perspective is the recasting of old problems in new terms. By altering the conceptual vocabulary we use to think about problems, we may discover solutions which were obscured by prior ways of thinking about things. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems are all approaches to cognition which are relatively new and have been claimed to represent such paradigm shifts. Just how deep the shifts are remains an open question, but each of these approaches certainly seems to offer novel ways of dealing with basic questions in cognitive science.