Rules in computationalism and connectionism

Connectionist and computationalist theories are contrasted in many ways in the literature. Extremely common among these contrasts are distinctions that in various ways involve rules. For example, connectionist models are not supposed to use explicit rules where computationalist models do. Connectionist models are said to use soft rules, or soft constraints, where computationalist models do not. We believe that, while the distinctions that have been offered in the literature make sense, they do not serve to contrast computationalist models as a class from connectionist models as a class. In other words, for each of the distinctions that has been offered, we believe there to exist both computationalist and connectionist models that fall on either side of the distinctions. Thus, both connectionist and computationalist models may be said to use explicit rules, to use soft rules, and so forth.